A Girl From Zanzibar

by Roger King

  “I don’t think so. The British.”

  “Oh, too bad for you. No wine. We had them both. When are you coming?”

  “I’m not sure. Would next weekend be all right?” “Oh, yes. Next weekend would be perfect. You can have our sofabed. Come any time. Be spontaneous.”

  “I want to pay you something, of course.”

  “Oh, goody. Money. But don’t worry about it too much. There’s always rich men.” She shouted the last words away from the phone for someone else’s benefit, then lost herself in giggling.

  “Thanks,” I said. “You don’t know how grateful I am.

  “De rien, cherie. See you next weekend.”

  “I told you before that you should go to the doctor with that cough.” I had coughed through the night, keeping Geoffrey awake.

  “Maybe it’s this house. Or the damp here.” I had no wish to go to the doctor. I was unreasonably possessive of my cough, and Geoffrey was unreasonably impatient about it. Outside the window by our bed, the early morning sky was grey. I turned towards Geoffrey’s warm body, put my hand on his shoulder.

  “I’m going to London.”

  He was silent.

  “I have to leave,” I added, to make it clear. “Not just because of the cough.”

  He twisted free of my hand, pulled the pillow over his head and beat the bed with his fist.

  “Geoffrey!”

  He turned back towards me and sat up. “I know,” he said. “I’ve made a mess of it, haven’t I?”

  “No, no. You’ve been good to me, bringing me home. I’m grateful. But I shouldn’t be here, should I? I’m not what you need.”

  “It’s my fault. I’m just not good with women. I thought I could overcome it with you. I love you, Marcella.”

  “Geoffrey, stop it. Don’t say anything. Just let me leave.”

  “Where will you go? What about money?”

  “I have friends in London.”

  “You do?”

  “Friends of Kamara. Monique and Gabrielle. Remember? And some money from home arrived.”

  “So you can afford to ditch me now.”

  “Geoffrey, don’t. You’re not happy with me here. Don’t pretend you are. Reading isn’t Zanzibar. And even in Zanzibar...”

  I wanted this over; I wanted to be out the door. Geoffrey had managed to find some tears and they were rolling down his cheeks. “We’ll be friends,” I said.

  “You can always come back if you get stuck. You’ll ask me for help if you need it, won’t you?”

  “Of course,” I replied, determined that I would not.

  So, now that I’ve worked around to her, brought Monique to me in Vermont, I’ve drafted a letter to her. I can send it via Gabrielle in London. Monique is in a better position than anyone to find out about Benji, if she is willing to try. The letter has, so far, only sat on the dresser in my bedroom, not finding its way into an envelope. On second thought, it might be better to write to Gabrielle and have her try to speak to Monique. So that Monique has nothing on paper to leave around. And probably I should not include my address, and instead take a post office box in another town. I don’t like this thinking. This thinking gives me a knot in my stomach.

  ♦

  IN MY LIFE

  WE WERE ALL EASIER IN THE WORLD THEN. MONIQUE,when I first arrived, embraced me in her dressing gown, all laughter and fluidity. Her cape of damp, springy hair enclosed me. “You caught me,” she said. “Come in. Make yourself at home.”

  I was an hour early. Alone, I had taken the sleek Intercity train from Reading to Paddington, and a black taxi from Paddington to Hereford Road, Bayswater. I refused to let Geoffrey come. The whole journey was forty minutes, but because it had seemed so big a journey, I had allowed two hours. I was certain that I was on the point of starting my new life.

  “Please,” I said, “can I just leave my suitcase here and come back later?”

  “There’s no need for you to leave. We can talk while I dress.”

  “No, I want to. I want to see where I am.”

  “In the rain?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “OK. Comme tu veux. But, Marcella, don’t get lost. And come back for dinner. Meet some friends.”

  I closed the door on Monique’s smile and stepped into the street.

  On my first night in Bayswater, I was a little ridiculous. I was absolutely certain that as I discovered my new neighborhood, I would, in fact, be discovering my future self. A false step might send me off in the wrong direction for the rest of my life. An unpleasant encounter would mean that all my future would be shadowed by unpleasantness. I held my breath. My feet barely touched the ground. My mind was empty of the past. My eyes, ears and nose were ready at my service. The optimism of youth. The migrant’s faith in rebirth.

  Like today, it was February then, and London was wet with a soft rain that hardly seemed to fall. The streets shone with reflected light. I put up the hood of the ugly green anorak I had bought in Reading on Geoffrey’s advice and tied it under my chin. I wanted to be invisible. The wrought-iron front gate clicked shut behind me and I was thrilled to be outside. The paving stones, I thought, were remarkably solid. I turned towards the bright lights of Westbourne Grove and was careful not to step on the cracks, the girl from Zanzibar who shone at hopscotch.

  There was a house opposite with an uncurtained window giving onto a brightly lit room, as if the owners wanted to display their lives. At first the room was empty except for a table set with plates, knives and forks, glasses, serviettes, flowers, candles. Then a man in a striped shirt showed himself. He opened up a newspaper, resting it on the table settings, and bent over to read it, leaning on the back of a chair. I felt I was witnessing the secrets of London life. A young woman in a black dress entered, carrying a bowl. She stopped, spoke to the man, who, instead of looking at her, looked at his watch. She put the bowl down on top of his newspaper. While she shook her hair free of a clip and talked, he pretended to continue to read. I saw him raise his eyebrows once, then stretch and walk to the window where he stood with his back to her but looking blankly towards me.

  I shook myself free, sorry to have paid the window display so much attention. Westbourne Grove was blessedly busy. People walked quickly or hung around restaurant menus, leaning into each other. Every other vehicle was a red bus or a black taxi. It felt daring even to step into the stream, as if I were a gate-crasher. On the corner was a Greek restaurant. Happily, I could place Greece—we had a Greek on Zanzibar. I hadn’t lost my bearings yet. Opposite was a little corner shop selling sweets and magazines, with an Indian boy at the till. There was a Chinese restaurant and a Malaysian restaurant. A grocery shop with a sign in Arabic script. A shop with new cars behind its window! As far as I could see there were bright shops and restaurants, crowded pavements, cars, taxis, buses. Any one of the restaurants would have been the smartest place on Zanzibar. Chinese, Brazilian, Iranian, a French patisserie. This street was vertigo; I walked carefully to keep my balance. I spotted pedestrians with who-knew-what on their minds bearing down on me and took early avoiding action. To avert the danger of overwhelmment I decided the trick was to file now and make sense later, like a lion gobbling prey to digest at leisure. TSB Bank, Lloyds Bank (two L’s), National Westminster Bank. Pip Printing—a mystery. J. H. Kenyon Ltd., Funeral Directors—out of place.

  I stopped where the gorgeous produce of a food shop spread across the pavement like a lolling tongue. Oranges, bananas, yams, ginger, pineapples, tomatoes, bunches of flowers. Fruits and vegetables I had never seen. I looked up to discover the name of the shop: White Rose and then some writing in Chinese, with a rose outlined in white neon. On the opposite side of the street another lolling tongue of plenty spread out from a shop with a sign in Arabic and a promise in English to stay open for twenty-four hours of every day. This street was busy like this for twenty-four hours? I looked at the customers. Pale English in black overcoats, the girls all in black tights. Africans, Middle-Easterners, Asians,
blonde tourists in pastel play clothes. Geoffrey had been such a liar about London, making it poor and dull. In the back of the shiny black Mercedes blocking traffic outside a halal butcher sat two Arab women chatting behind metallic masks. I examined the traffic; the expensive cars belonged to people with brown skins.

  There was a newsagent’s that was no more than a corridor lined with racks of magazines with a plump sari-ed woman planted at its till. I stopped for this, caught by the smallness of it and the welcome hint of possibility that came with this scale. Might this be comparable to a soft ice-cream machine on Zanzibar? The intensity of my possessive thoughts reached the plump woman because she suddenly turned to me with an angry look that sent me on my way. Dicky Dirts—an empty shop full of the jeans that I now noticed were not as fashionable in Bayswater as they had been in Dar. The Diwana—vegetarian Indian food. A huge bookshop only for books in Arabic or about Arab countries. A cafe with sinuous brass teapots in its window that would have been at home in Zanzibar. I looked up: “Le Cafe,” said the sign. The window was misty with condensation but I could make out people talking over small tables crowded with the paraphernalia of coffee, tea and cakes. It did not cross my mind for a second that I might walk in out of the rain and sit down at a table.

  A bus rushed past, fast and close, its wheels in the gutter, passengers hanging on to its rear platform, holding tight and riding the breeze. I needed to keep my wits about me. The taxis, I noticed, had little golden lights on their roofs, like jewels. Why were they never full?

  That night I walked the backbone of my future life. Le Cafe would become my daily stopping place for croissants and cappuccino, words I had yet to learn. The Iraqi owners would become my friends. Across the road and down a side street I could have made out, if I had known to look, a dingy Greek cafe that one day would fill my every thought. Further on along Westbourne Grove there was the Abyssinia restaurant, which I now passed, without thinking to look up to the flat above that would one day be my home. At the traffic lights where Westbourne Grove met Queensway, if I had looked left instead of right, I would have seen Porchester Baths and might have been cheered by future meditative swims, Russian saunas, deep massages. I might have noticed Arthur Court and Ralph Court, good blocks of flats, it would turn out, for placing short-term foreign visitors. Or ahead I could have picked out the wet, deserted patio of the Pizza Express where one day Benji and I would scheme together and darken in the sun. Knowing none of this, I weighted everything evenly, ready to give each place an equal chance.

  The backbone of my future life turned right at the lights, following the current into Queensway. Then, abruptly, one side of the street was entirely dead, dark and avoided by pedestrians. An enormous grey building with fluted columns and domed roofs occupied the gloom. The windows were boarded and its clock was stopped. No one wanted to be on that side of the street. I slowed and stopped to examine the building while people walked around me, remembering Zanzibar, the old fort, the House of Wonders, our population of ghosts. Whiteley’s Department Store, read the sign. I stood there, wondering how and when and why, seemingly the only one touched and made anxious by this evidence of gigantic economic catastrophe.

  I was becoming exhausted by my ridiculous effort to comprehend Bayswater in a single evening. Carpenters the hardware shop, Nisa the supermarket, Thomas Cook, a Post Office: each failed to properly register in my mental file. I misjudged the rapid progress of a group of young men and was buffeted like a scrap of paper. Now I was in the brightest part of Bayswater, where Queensway burned at its highest wattage for the sake of the foreign tourists, but I felt exposed by the light rather than drawn to it. I pushed on. Mongolian food. Bulgarian food. Pizza Hut. Bayswater Tube station did not produce the slightest frisson of premonition. The woman being helped from a car outside the Golden Horseshoe casino might as well have been the other side of glass. A life for me here was less and less imaginable with each step. The awning announcing Queens Ice Skating Club seemed impossibly strange. Two girls in short, frilly skirts burst out, skates tied around their necks and bouncing against their chests. The Coburg Hotel occupying Queensway’s final corner—the end of the road, thank goodness— looked grand and forbidding to me then, with its redbrick walls and domed turrets. Ahead was a road of fast- moving traffic and beyond that the gated darkness of Kensington Gardens. I turned on my heel, feeling that I had now seen everything of my new home, but instead of my wide eyes being rewarded with the revelation of a new life, I had been mocked by abundance, like a hopeful new wife discovering she is only the two hundredth concubine of an old and absent-minded sultan.

  Not far into my more inward return, I found myself gaping stupidly at a phone box covered with the advertising cards of prostitutes: wet sex, new young Asian, domination, oral, anal, uniforms. When I registered what was in front of my eyes and the inappropriateness of my attention to it, I instead pretended to look across the road, and found my eyes on a dull patch between a Chinese restaurant and a luggage shop, a dingy church of yellow brick turning grey. Our Lady Queen of Heaven Catholic Church. St Joe’s in Zanzibar was far grander. I stared, amid all the strangeness, and wondered whether there might be something there for me. “We’re the only Catholics here,” came Mrs F’s voice. The church’s low, dark arched door was mean, shut and uninviting, and the moment passed. On each side the brightly lit businesses sprang forward into their former prominence, returning the church to obscurity. I shook myself, told myself I was a silly girl, probably affected by nothing more complicated than hunger, and briskly headed back to Hereford Road, where Monique had promised food and company.

  MY LETTER TO GABRIELLE IS GATHERING DUST. IT HASmade it into an envelope, but the envelope has not yet progressed further than being propped up on the kitchen cabinet, where I also prop up my electricity and telephone bills before paying them. So far it has escaped several mailings, left behind each time like a jilted bride. Neither have I sealed it closed, in case I need once more to review the contents. For a while a letter to Geoffrey stood next to it, but in the end that one winged off to England on its own.

  In the letter I ask Gabrielle to ask Monique to ask Ad- nam to tell her what has happened to Benji. For nine years I have not asked, and for nine years Benji has not tried to find me. Adnam forbade Monique to have any contact with me and I knew at Cookham Wood that my letters might be read by the prison authorities. So I’ve waited, and now I’ve written my letter and am afraid to send it. Homely Vermont dust gently collects on it, a letter that might tug all the world to me.

  Julia noticed. She picked it up. “This letter has been sitting here for weeks.”

  “Yes. I can’t decide whether to send it.”

  “Then why did you write it?”

  “Haven’t you ever written a letter and then hesitated to send it? Put it aside until you could decide?”

  “Of course. Doesn’t everyone do that? But I always send them in the end. Otherwise it’s a waste of time.” She laughed.

  “To your boyfriend?”

  “Usually.”

  “And how does it work out?”

  “Good. Sometimes I say things I regret, but it’s good he knows I have these thoughts. He should know that about me.”

  “Don’t you think it’s better to keep quiet sometimes? Not to stir things up?”

  It was not a good question for a twenty-one-year-old too eager to have firm opinions of her own. “Look,” she said, “if it still bothers you enough to write a letter, it’s not settled. Don’t worry so much about how it affects other people. If it’s unresolved for you, it’s probably unresolved for them. It seems to me you have some issues about your past and you need to find closure or something to move on.”

  Closure, issues, resolution. I’ve tried to insert these words into my life. I would close Bayswater, close Zanzibar. Resolve the Benji issue. I would move on, a mental migrant.

  “Who’s it to, anyway?” asked Julia, looking at the envelope rather than me. I could see that this was her way of clai
ming friendship, to presume to be my advisor as I was hers, and I did not want to rebuff the attempt. “To a friend,” I said. “Asking about another friend who I haven’t heard from in a long time.”

  “Your old boyfriend in England? Your partner?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.”

  “Then why don’t you just send it? You don’t seem to be interested in anyone here. What have you got to lose?” When Julia is earnest deep lines form on her young forehead.

  “Peace of mind?”

  “But if you have that, why did you even bother to write the letter?”

  “You’ve got a point.”

  I wasn’t looking for a man in London any more than I am now. I’d just left a limp and teary one behind in Reading, which tugged at me a little. The relationship that was on my mind now was the one between me and London, and for that I fancied I would need all my wits about me. I had loved arriving at Paddington station with a single suitcase in my hand, no one noticing me. A burglar in the garden of the rich. The taxi ride to Hereford Road was a solitary thrill. I dared myself to be equal to the buildings, to master the streets. Now, ringing the doorbell for a second time, depleted by the effort to be equal to a city, I was left dumb and disconcerted when the door was flung open by a man.

  I stood there, my anorak dripping, flustered by the thought that I had returned to the wrong house and might never again find the right one. The man was smiling at me but talking into a phone held in his left hand. In his right he held a wooden spoon that was still steaming. I remember that his eyes sparkled. That he looked Indian. That he wore an apron with a picture of a panda on it. He laughed heartily, but it was at something on the phone, not me. To me, he smiled and nodded, moving aside to make room. When I failed to move, he gestured in front of me with the steaming spoon, a curry-scented wand, and when I still did not move he said into the phone, “Excuse me just a second,” and muffled the receiver against his shoulder, explaining to me, “You’re Marcella, aren’t you? Come on in. Sorry I can’t say hello properly”—he glanced towards the phone—“Business.” Then he stuck the spoon into the same hand that held the phone and reached out to yank me from the spot on which I was stuck so that I ended up almost in his arms. “Let’s shut out the English weather. Gabrielle and Monique are in the living room. I’m Benji. Welcome. Talk to you later.” Then, into the receiver: “OK, I’m back.”