A Girl From Zanzibar

by Roger King

  “Well, call me tomorrow.”

  “Good! So it’s settled. And this is for a new dress. Something nice, you know.”

  Indoors I counted the money and found it was a thousand pounds. I considered returning it, but Monique overruled me. “You want to give it back? Are you a crazy woman? Une folle? We must spend it!” She swept me off to spend five hundred on a purple silk slip of a dress that showed me for the first time what money could do for me.

  On the way to the party, in the middle of a downpour, Ismael’s car had a puncture in Piccadilly Circus. It was a Saab this time; the cars changed all the time. The moving messages of the neon advertisments above us were garbled among the streams of water on the windscreen. Even in the rain the area was swarming with Saturday night people, so that they overflowed from the pavements onto the road. The mood was exuberant and loud in a way I had not seen in England before. “These people are all drunk,” Ismael stated, with disgust.

  His response to our breakdown and the traffic chaos we were creating was to make a call on the car phone. “It’s not my car,” he explained unnecessarily while he dialled. I watched silently as his face become less pretty and his Arabic more furious. He put the phone down and, after a moment, turned to me, looking pale. “I have to change the wheel.” He turned up the collar of his jacket and opened the door like a man about to sacrifice his life. “You must get out too.”

  I stood next to him, the rain flattening my hair. Ismael had no idea of how to go about jacking up a car and changing a wheel. I did; my taxis in Dar had thin tyres. “You should loosen the wheel nuts first,” I said.

  “Just look out for the traffic!” he replied.

  Buses and cars inched their way past and one taxi driver took the opportunity to shout something that drew more attention to us and made the people watching from the pavement laugh. No one offered to help. No policeman turned up. A crowd of young men was spreading out from the shelter of an awning, happily following our progress, oblivious to the rain. Some had no jackets and held beer cans to where their stomachs pressed against sopping shirts. I was caught between them and the traffic, which every now and then would insult me with a splash of dirty water. My new dress was sticking to me, my breasts and bottom, so that I felt I was naked and that all of London was giving me a physical examination.

  “Magic carpet broken down, has it, Mohammed?” offered one of our audience. “Pray to Allah. Maybe he’ll change your wheel.” Ismael kept his head down, staging a fumbling, hopeless battle with the spanner and jack. “Better hurry up, Mohammed, your bint’s dress is shrinking. Come home with me, love. I’ve got a bus pass.”

  Without so much as a glance at me, Ismael abruptly threw down the tools, bolted across the road and jumped into a taxi that was making a break for freedom in the direction of Trafalgar Square. I was dumbfounded. Gob- struck. I watched the back lights disappear. A cheer from the crowd was fading before I’d heard it, and a lone voice pointed out, “He’s left you, darling.” Another said, “I’ll give you a fiver for the night.”

  I pulled at the car door. Locked. My handbag was right there on the front seat, completely unavailable to me. I was wet, cold, indecent and I had no money. Worst of all, everyone was looking at me. I moved towards the pavement and, as I did, a group of boys wheeled in my direction like a flock of sheep. I turned the other way, back into the streams of slow-moving traffic, realising only when I actually walked into the side of one that, money or not, I could do as Ismael did and get in a taxi.

  I sat rigid. The eyes of the bulky, elderly driver kept wandering into his mirror and searching me out, and I kept moving mine away. “Please,” I said to myself. “Please let there be someone at home.”

  “Six pounds and forty pence,” the driver announced. Carefully, to ensure there would be no room for doubt, even for a foreigner.

  “I just have to go inside,” I said, reaching for the door handle. Locked. How could it be locked; he hadn’t touched it.

  “I’ll have the fare now, if you don’t mind.”

  “I haven’t got it now.”

  I sat there, cold and small and captive while he shouted at me, an angry speech all about people who took taxis without money in their pockets and “bloody foreigners” who came to England and thought they owned the place. “I’ve a mind to take you straight to the police station,” he said.

  I said, “Please, just let me go in.”

  “I suppose I’ll have to, won’t I?”

  He followed so close behind me that I could smell his old man’s smell on his cardigan. He was an old man but a big one.

  There was no light. Of course, Monique was at the party—being stupid, with her stupid friends—and Gabrielle was working nights. But someone ... I rang the bell. “Not your home, then,” observed the taxi driver.

  “It is.”

  “Then where’s your key?”

  “My bag... it was stolen.”

  “Right. And you’re the Virgin Mary, and I’m a monkey’s uncle. You’re going to come with me, girlie.” He folded his hand around my bicep.

  The door opened and Benji filled the frame, rubbing his eyes. Without thought or dignity, I threw myself into his arms.

  “Hey, Zanzibar girl!” He prised me off him and regarded me quizzically at arm’s length. “Zanzibar drowned rat,” he corrected.

  Benji paid for the taxi, giving the driver a tip large enough to make him polite.

  “He was rude,” I said.

  “Always tip well,” he replied, as if I was his student. “When you have money you should tip well as an investment, and when you don’t have money you should tip well so no one will guess.” Benji’s laws; he always seemed so certain.

  “You look frozen. I’ll run you a bath.” He was quite at home.

  “Are you alone here?”

  “I was. I just came by to watch a video in peace. Then I fell asleep. A Fellini film—Italian. You know him?” “Italian? No, of course not. Benji, you know Adnam and Ismael?”

  “Monique’s Adnam? Of course. Our business paths cross sometimes. Very well connected. Heads of state, that sort of thing. Arms sales mostly, I think. Our Monique is moving in the stratosphere these days. Ismael’s just one of his assistants, isn’t he?”

  “I thought they must be arms dealers.”

  “Well, it’s the biggest export business. The one governments are most interested in.” He was matter-of-fact and I thought he might be concealing his disapproval, but it could have been his envy.

  While we watched the bath fill, I told Benji about the evening. When I finished, he said, “You don’t want to get involved in their parties. Monique is all right because she has Adnam, but Ismael’s just a nobody. He’s just a go- between for rich people. Maybe you had a close escape. I love Monique but sometimes she’s got no judgement.” “I needed something—I left my job on the first day. My customer was murdered.”

  “Something will come up. Take your bath. Look at you. You’re an incitement to riot.”

  He acted like an older brother, and he was older, but it seemed to me he had none of the fixed things of life that made age old. “Tea?” he called through the bathroom door. “Or something stronger? Scotch?”

  “Is there brandy?”

  “Absolutely. No ice, I take it.”

  I stretched out in the very hot water, luxurious in the sisters’ bubble bath. This was comfortable, to be sleepy in the bath with Benji taking care of things next door.

  After a while, he roused me with “Your drink’s ready when you are.” His voice through the door was very close to my ear.

  “Can you pass it to me?”

  The door opened a few inches and Benji’s hand with the glass in it curled around towards the bath, searching for a surface to put it on and coming up short. “Shall I leave it on the floor?”

  “No, wait. I’m getting out.” I stood and wrapped a towel around myself. “You can come in now.”

  Benji pushed open the door, his eyes modestly brushing past me,
only pausing to notice that my hands were occupied with the towel. “I’ll put it here, on the shelf.” Then he stated the obvious, “You’re wet,” and as he turned to leave he gave my back a little perfunctory rub through the towel. Which turned out to be both too much touch and too little because I found myself pushing back against his hand. He pecked at me in an enquiring sort of way, then we kissed, soft, warm and limitless. I opened my eyes to find his still closed, his face so intent and unguarded that I smiled inwardly at my tender victory. Benji’s arms surrounded me and it felt as much like home as Piccadilly Circus, an hour or two before, had not.

  I remember love. There was an ease to it. Making love with Benji was not the teenage hotness I had with Ali, nor the sexiness of illicit meetings with Zanzibar lovers, nor the greediness for novelty with Didier, and certainly not Geoffrey’s confusing ambiguity. We were lost in blessed roughness and then we were gentle, interested in the news from our fingertips, tiny movements inside, small alterations in our humid weather, how we looked together underneath the sheets, him vanishing into me, our legs all tangled. In the early days we would lie like this for hours, not risking the disruption of a clumsy word or movement.

  “Where do you get your self-control?” I asked at the end of one long morning. “Or is it just that you’re old?” “Experienced, Marcella. Not old.”

  An ease to it. An ease to talking. To touch. An ease in our laughter. An easy understanding. I was not alone.

  On the night that he rescued me from the taxi driver, he left in the small hours.

  “Where are you going now?” I asked sleepily. Benji had not talked about his home.

  “Oh, there’s some people I should see.”

  “In the middle of the night?”

  “Business, like beauty, knows no pain.” He kissed me.

  At school in Zanzibar I was always the one the other children wanted to come to the front of the class and tell stories. The nuns encouraged them to choose someone with a tamer imagination, but my classmates wanted me. My stories were fantastic, full of incredible adventures in magical kingdoms. My sister Maria complained to our mother that I told lies, but it was only that I preferred more exciting versions of our lives. When I came home from school I learned to say to Mummy, “I’m going to tell you what happened today but none of it is true.”

  The brilliant storyteller was lost when I was nine or ten. But the child was returned to me that night, after Benji left. I imagined myself a long-legged giantess walking daintily through the night-time city. I had to set my feet down carefully since they filled the spaces between the buildings. I cast gentle spells, banishing loneliness by moving people from one place to another, blessing failing businesses with a touch, taking people from cold streets to warm beds. I made Whiteley’s light up with the electricity in my fingertip. I caressed the green of Kensington Gardens with my palm.

  By morning my poodle period was over. Later, when I saw pretty girls sitting in waiting cars, I was amazed that I could ever have been so passive and beholden. I added the patronage of rich men to the list of ways I could not live, which already included government hand-outs and menial employment in fast-food restaurants. I awoke to find I was energetic, brilliant, in possession of sound judgement and full of confidence.

  IT'S BEEN NINE YEARS. SUPPOSEDLY HER THIRTIES AREthe sexiest years in a woman’s life, and I’ve missed mine. I never took a girlfriend in Cookham Wood, my taste preferring books, though my roommate, Bintu, came to be like a sister. Benji is still the last one.

  Ron, I know, is interested, but I pretend not to understand. At the video store in Brattleboro last week, he edged me near the “adult” section, saying, “We could always get one of these.”

  “These?”

  “I was joking. They’re adult films. Erotic films.”

  “Well, I don’t think that would be appropriate!” I feigned shock.

  In fact part of me would like to be shocked. Vermont life is proving low in shocks. But Ron with his circumspection is not the man to tempt me, though I fear that sooner or later he will make a determined grab.

  The only visitor to my bed who has not come from my imagination is Julia. And then only once and quite innocently. Even so, I’m inclined to think it’s had its consequences. She’s my teaching assistant for cross- cultural studies this semester and returned from break a day early, before the dorm opened. “I’ll stay overnight in Brattleboro,” she said when she called me. To which I replied, “Don’t be silly! It’ll be expensive. You can stay here.”

  In my mind I was back in Hereford Road or Zanzibar: open doors, room for visitors, the Third World hospitality reflex.

  “I’ll sleep on the floor,” said Julia. “I have my sleeping bag.”

  “I’m sure we can do better than that,” I replied without thought.

  In fact I could not do better than that. In six months Julia was my first visitor and I only now discovered that there was not enough spare bedding to make up a bed on the couch.

  I looked around at the house that was now revealed to be an inhospitable home. It reeked of someone who did not get out enough. There were the remains of the snacks that I make at all hours according to no particular pattern. Every surface was covered with books and papers. There were open notebooks on my desk, the kitchen table and the table next to my bed, in case I wanted to jot down some thought about class plans, my paper on migration, or my life. There used to be a notebook for each of these, but now the jottings had become intermingled: cross- cultural studies, migration, me. When did I become selfobsessed and slovenly?

  “My bed is huge,” I told Julia. “We can both sleep there.” I was back to Zanzibar and the companionable way visiting friends and cousins shared beds out of simple practicality, the unselfconscious touch of Africa.

  Julia gave me one of her keen looks. “OK,” she said. “Is this part of multi-cultural studies?”

  “Cross-cultural. I’ve changed the course name from multi-cultural to cross-cultural. They said I could teach what I wanted.”

  She stopped moving to think. “But it’s the opposite isn’t it? One’s about mixing up and the other’s about separating out.”

  “You are smarter than the dean, Julia. He couldn’t see the difference. I decided there’s only mixing up.”

  I did not sleep well. My ancient bed sags in the middle and I was used to sleeping on my back, centred in its valley. Gravity took me back there up against Julia’s tee- shirted body, she smelling as sweetly unperfumed as a child. She snuggled against me and I heard her sigh in sleep. I lay awake, stealing her warmth.

  The next morning Julia was in high spirits when we began our work. “This is a great idea,” she told me, of my proposal for course projects, and she took it up as if it were her own. The night had made her bold with me and I watched her, pleased to see a clever, awkward girl find her confidence.

  My good idea is to have the students prove to themselves that they come from everywhere. Instead of building their identities, I want to subvert them. I’ve told them to take something very American, anything: a man’s tie, apple pie, a dinner fork, flags, the briefcase, pants, the custom of shaving, the wedding ceremony, the single finger of abuse, the handshake, the display of the female’s leg in fashion, money, make-up, mathematics. I want them to take something that they believe is theirs and trace it back to its earliest origins. I know where this will take them. To Europe, which they will expect, but also to Arabia and China, Persia, India and Africa, which they will not expect and which the lazy ones will not reach.

  I want to take everything familiar away from them, the sense that they own it, that their parents made it, or if not them, then even older white people back in Europe. They’ll see that when you go back far enough all you have is movement, people wandering and mixing things, that the idea of being German-Irish is no more precise a definition than being American. Just as being a Goan Indian Portuguese Arab African is too simple, all the parts as mixed and provisional as the whole. You come from everywhere,
it will all imply, and you belong nowhere.

  Julia added more items to the list, flew with ideas of her own, engaged by the notion of not belonging to the Mennonites. When we finally flagged and it was time for her to go, she saw my letter to Gabrielle on the kitchen dresser, dusty and unposted. “You’ve still got this? This is the letter asking about your boyfriend?” She gave me her amazed look, actually dropping her jaw. “You’re scared to send it?”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “Marcella, you’re becoming a nun here. These are your friends. Why wouldn’t you write to them?”

  “It’s complicated, Julia. The world is complicated.” “How? How is it complicated?”

  “Oh, I can’t tell you.”

  “You should do it. Would it help if I made the decision for you?”

  “It may be the only way I’ll ever do it,” I laughed.

  I had not meant it as permission, but this morning my heart stopped when I saw the letter was gone.

  Now I’m furious but feel my fury is unjustified. Perhaps the letter will unlock the past and stop me wondering about Benji. Maybe Julia has done me a favour by taking action. But I should have told her what was complicated. The world to her is full of emotional dangers, traumas, memories, bad parents, love affairs gone wrong, enemies of complete fulfillment. I forgot to tell her that the world is also full of real dangers: prisons, wars, murders. Now I have to wait and see which of us has the wiser understanding of the world. If she had not slept in my bed she would not have dared this.

  Recently, at a faculty meeting, there was a talk on the dangers of sexual harassment charges from students. We should be vigilant, keep our office doors ajar if we were ever alone with anyone. Students should not be invited home, never touched, hugged, offered too much comfort. I blushed at the discovery of how far my foreign ways had led me from the proper behaviour for an American professor.

  In London, newly in love with Benji, the sort of luck that falls into the laps of those happy, optimistic and at ease, fell into mine. He said, “I’ve got a Greek friend, a business contact. He’s giving up his restaurant in Garway Road, just off Westbourne Grove. There’s two months left on the lease and he says we can have it for nothing. Starting tomorrow. It’s all equipped. Interested?”