A Girl From Zanzibar

by Roger King

  But all this must seem very far away for you, and you want to know about Benji. None of us have seen him or heard from him, and of course it’s been quite a few years now. I haven’t been sure what to do about your suggestion that I ask Monique to ask Adnam. She’s in Abu Dhabi now, trying to be a Moslem wife. I don’t think Adnam tells her anything about his business, and he doesn’t bring her when he visits London. Honestly, Marcella, I feel worried about my sister, and I don’t want to do anything that will make her life more difficult. I think she may have had some sort of nervous breakdown. Her letters are very short and the writing shaky. Once or twice she has called me at night, but it’s always as if she fears someone is listening. It’s awful to hear her that way. She’s always been a little bit of a child, you know. I wish I could do something. I’ve never even seen my nephew!

  But I’m sure you are right. Adnam is the person most likely to know what has happened to Benji, especially since the BCCI went bust (their branch in Queensway in now a Cullens grocery!). But do you really want to know, Marcella? Don’t you think that if he had wanted to get in touch he would have found a way? After all, he has this address. Maybe he just wants to get on with a new life too. Benji was never exactly reliable. And if the news is bad (God forbid), what use is it to stir things up? You have a good new life over there and I think you should make the most of it and not look to the past too much. Of course you probably don’t want to hear my advice and it’s up to you. I’ve enclosed Adnam’s address in Abu Dhabi, though I rather hope you will not use it.

  Well, that’s all for now. I’m so pleased to know you are doing well. I’ve missed my Zanzibar sister! Maybe I’ll visit you in America one day.

  Love, Gabrielle

  I read the letter and posted a note to Adnam before I could think. Gabrielle’s sensible advice had the opposite of its intended effect. It produced a headache of the Zanzibar chant in me: “It might have been the ... It might have been the ..the curse of never knowing for sure, that made me want to solve the puzzle much more than I wanted to be safe or sensible. The whole truth, just for once.

  Ron is travelling too. He has not grown much on me with time, though I seem to have grown on him. It’s probably my fault. I’ve accepted his dinner invitations but nothing more, being not at all curious to discover whether his private parts are matched by his rather small nose or his rather large bottom. But he is easy to see because he persistently asks, and if I didn’t see him, I might see no one. Over dinner last week, now a chaste regular event that I secretly value for its conversation, he grinned at me and said, “You’ll never guess where I’m going for my vacation.”

  “London?”

  “No.”

  I tried to think of where else Dickens had set his books and found I did not know. “Then I can’t guess.”

  “Zanzibar.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes!”

  He was delighted with himself. I, on the other hand, was angry. It was as if he had put his hand inside my clothing without my permission. I said, “You can’t just visit Zanzibar like ... New York.”

  “But you can. There’s a Tanzania package. Three days at a game park, three for Mount Kilimanjaro and three for Zanzibar. The agent said it was a hot new destination.”

  “It’s not a place for tourists.”

  “I think you might be out of date, Marcella. He showed me pictures of new hotels on the beach. That’s all tourists need, hotels, sun and beaches. He said it was popular with gay tourists and that they always find the new smart places first. Do you think he thought I was one?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me. Why do you want to go there? That’s my home!”

  For the first time, Ron realised I was genuinely upset and now looked hurt. “I thought you’d be interested to hear what it was like now. Aren’t you?”

  “I wish I’d never told you I was from there.”

  “It would be something in common.”

  “Who said I wanted something in common? Did I say I wanted to be reminded of Zanzibar? I remember it well enough. I know its history. That’s where I want it to stay. As history.”

  “Well, it’s too late now. I’ve already booked.”

  In prison I did for myself and Zanzibar what my students have been doing for the necktie and the oboe, testing the depth of the shifting sand upon which I stood. Most recently there were the British and I doubt I have any of their blood. They never owned Zanzibar, just made it a Protectorate, protected it for the Omani Arab rulers. It seems I have lots of their blood. And since they mixed themselves up with the whole known world, I don’t know who else. According to the diary of a Zanzibar Arab princess who I like to consider my distant relation (she had a scandalous affair with a German diplomat, got pregnant and was smuggled to Europe in 1867), her father, the sultan, had seventy-five concubines, including all of the shades of Africa, Arabia, Persia and Europe. When any concubine gave birth he accepted the child and freed the mother from slavery. My Zanzibar mother could have been anything.

  Then, before the Arab sultanate there were the Turks and before that the Portuguese—who I’ve got anyway on my Goan side. Marco Polo visited from Italy and lied about the island to make it more fabulous. The Zoroastrian Persians ruled for a time, and some Zanzibaris still claim their ancestry. A thousand years ago it was the regular destination of traders from Asia—the Malays, the Chinese and the Japanese, who tried to conquer it. That was after the native population had been overrun by Bantu tribes from Africa at about the time of Jesus, which was already after the Sabaeans and Himyarites from Arabia had made Zanzibar into the region’s Whiteley’s Department Store during King Solomon’s reign. The Romans were there too, and before them the Greeks. The Egyptians under the Pharaohs visited, so did the Phoenicians and the Jews, and even before then it was established as the Indian Ocean trading centre under the Chaldeans in the sixth century BC, building on the earlier importance given to Zanzibar by the Sumerians and Assyrians. I couldn’t go back beyond fifteen thousand BC, when, I learned, Zanzibar was inhabited by the people of the Heliolithic culture, that improbably embraced the coastal populations of the Mediterranean, India, China, Peru and Mexico, which would join me to everything I’m not already joined to, including America, just going to prove that nothing is separate,nothing fixed, and that migration is our natural state.

  Now I’m starting to look at my Goan side, more restless even than the Arab. After the Portuguese converted us and detached us from our Hindu India, we seem to have gone everywhere. There was even a colony of prosperous, well-behaved Goans—accountants and lawyers, Mrs F’s nephew among them—in Haringey, north London, so respectable and striving that I did not for a minute think of visiting.

  I have no present plan for movement, no intention other than staying here, where everyone is white and strange. I’m stuck. Poor Solzhenitsyn also hid out here, the locals in the store tell me, lived somewhere up the road. Migrant sub-group number three: unwilling political exiles. They also tell me that when he went home to Russia, he wasn’t wanted, which seemed like a warning to me not to fail to love them in Vermont.

  So, according to Gabrielle’s letter, the BCCI in Queensway has been replaced by a Cullen’s high-priced grocery. While I have been immobile, Bayswater, like Zanzibar, has moved on without me. First Whiteley’s and now the BCCI. This was my branch of the bank, the one that was opened at the same time that Adnam opened my account for the house conversion. It extended my regular walks: Hereford Road—Le Cafe—Porchester Baths—BCCI. The backbone of my Bayswater life. It was an obvious expansion for the BCCI, convenient to rich Arabs and Asians, opposite the Golden Horseshoe Casino.

  In those days I was nervous and intoxicated, my mind entirely on the house conversion. The amount of money seemed enormous to me at the time, and the days were filled with additional thrills: the thrill of telling gangs of men what to do; of seeing a big building taken apart and reassembled at my bidding—walls smashed, a staircase ripped out; of blue architectural
plans; of writing cheques; of calculating how much we would make. I jumped out of bed in the mornings and at night I lay awake, anxiously running through the details in my mind. There was nothing beyond getting this done, pulling it off.

  Benji knew contractors of every sort, or knew people who knew them, and I saw that he was right again: contacts were everything. I was on the phone, in demand, short of time, exhausted, worried, blessedly busy. I decided that I had never been right for the slowness of Zanzibar or Dar, where we had to turn gossip into an art just to make ourselves a life. Benji listened to my worries, calmed me, told me that everything was fine, cuddled me enough nights to make it OK. I told him, certain of it, “I could not do this without you.”

  There were problems that caught me by surprise in spite of all my worrying. I received a message instructing me to go to a phone box at a certain time. “Listen carefully,” said the voice when I picked up the phone, “I’m not going to repeat myself. There are several difficulties with your planning application which can result in its rejection. We can make these go away, but it will cost you three thousand pounds.”

  Stupid, I said, “To pay for what?”

  “To make them go away.” His sharp tone told me I was stupid.

  A bribe. I went silent. I was going from being surprised to not being surprised—from London to Zanzibar and back to London again. The voice said, “Did you hear?”

  “Yes. It’s too much. We can’t afford that.”

  “Three thousand. I will put the phone down.”

  “One thousand five hundred. It’s all we can afford.” “All right. Two thousand. Listen. I’ll send a motorcycle messenger to this phone box at three o’clock. Put the money in an envelope and give it to him. Old notes.” “How do I know you will do what you say?”

  “You’ve no choice.” He put the phone down.

  I called Benji on his car phone. “It’s normal,” he said. “We’ll pay it. You handled it like a pro.”

  I called Kamara. The call had been from someone at his council. He said, “I don’t know how those people in planning operate. I think you have to pay if you want your flats.”

  “So, we’re in Africa?”

  “In fact.”

  I paid the money and we had our planning permission within a week.

  The other problems were routine. Our Sikh demolition crew was marking time because the new rubbish skip had not been delivered. The carpenters were ready to go and the roofers still hadn’t finished. An inspector threatened to stop us because he said our scaffolding was illegal. A whole crew of brickies and plasterers “did a runner” because they thought the inspector was from social security. The plumber tried to cheat us. I managed things and Benji went to the site to put the contractors straight.

  “What did you say to him?” I asked Benji, of the crooked plumber.

  “I was very polite. I didn’t raise my voice. I just told him I had been talking to my friends, and gave him the names of every developer who had used him in the last year and every one who was likely to use him next year. They’re all Asians anyway. When I looked at him again, his face was five shades whiter. He knows we’re connected now. He says he’ll throw in some bidets.”

  I loved it when Benji was right. We were in balance. Countering my anxious nights, we made love, in balance, at one or another of his temporary homes. I was astride him and wriggling. He was kneeling behind me, pulling my hips back onto him. He was squeezing my nipples between his thumbs and fingers, on the border of too hard. I was finding the places to squeeze him and drive him mad. He was in my hand, in my mouth, my vagina, my anus, my everywhere, my armpit, even. I let myself be filled with him—elusive, evasive Benji. I returned from a death one night—a little death—and saw below me in the moonlight that his eyes were open and he was smiling broadly, the white smile under the dark moustache.

  “Stop it. You’re laughing at me.”

  “No. I’m just amazed at you, that’s all.”

  “Amazed?”

  “At your amazing talents.”

  I stopped moving and held him still inside me, trying to squeeze and release myself around him. “Can you feel that?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But it’s not those talents I meant.”

  I worked at turning that smile of his into a grimace, until he flung his arms around me and rolled me underneath him.

  “You’re amazing too,” I said. “For your age.” My turn to smile, his turn to be on top, in our equal happiness.

  FOR A COLD CLIMATE THIS PLACE CAN BE SURPRISINGLY hot. The heat and insects have come to Vermont and I now know why my house has a porch and why the porch has wire-mesh screens. I’ve been reading in the hammock, wondering at the landscape, which has gone from all white to all green, someone heavy-handed with the paint pot here. This is home, even though neither the structure nor the furniture is mine. The evenings are most difficult; they are too long and too empty now the semester is over, and prison has left me unpracticed with space. There’s time to wonder how we teetered from our lovely perfect balance in Bayswater and why we could not read the clues and save ourselves. I go to bed early just to curl up with myself. I go to bed early and get up early, living entirely in the light.

  Hot, humid summer days in Bayswater always caught the English by surprise, wearing the wrong clothes, doing the wrong things. The swimming pool at Porchester Baths became a soup of screaming children and the men took to drinking their thick beer in the sun, growing red on two counts. We watched them, Benji and I, while we ate lunch on the patio of the Pizza Express at the corner of Westbourne Grove and Porchester Road. The tables were full of young office workers, commuters to Bayswater working in Building Societies, the girls pinkly sexy in their summer dresses and the boys uncomfortable in their loosened ties.

  We were very pleased with ourselves: the last flat had sold for a good price and I had repaid Adnam in full. In the morning I had located a rental flat in Queensway for a family from Kuwait who needed to be away from home for a discreet period, and it seemed I was being carried along by a happy momentum. In my shoulder bag was a deck of new business cards from Pip Printing with “Marcella de Souza, Property Consultant” on them. And Benji was glowing from his previous night’s dinner with Lord and Lady Cramp, those twigs of the Churchill family tree.

  On our way to lunch, we had strolled down Westbourne Grove, stopping to see our Iraqi friends at Le Cafe. Benji gave the bent old bag-lady outside the cafe a ten-pound note. She had settled there after discovering that our friends were kind and, unlike the English, offered food and drink to the destitute as a matter of principle. It was a day for resting on laurels.

  With the garlic bread and Peroni beer, our talk ran over the satisfactory events just completed and the equally satisfactory ones to be anticipated, much as our hands ran lightly over each other’s bodies after love. Then I asked, “Where are we going to live, Benji?”

  He was leaning back in his chair, the sun glinting on his forehead. For once he had left his suit jacket in his car. His head turned to idly track someone walking behind me, the waiter or a pretty woman.

  I pressed on: “Don’t you think it strange we are selling homes to people when we don’t have one ourselves? We can afford to buy something.”

  Benji’s photosensitive sunglasses had turned dark, and now they turned to face me. “Can we?”

  “Yes. Easily. With a loan.”

  He nodded and pushed himself up in his seat. I recognised Benji’s special air of gravity adopted for serious deals. I would have preferred the boyish enthusiasm. “Then we should. It doesn’t make sense not to.”

  “I think so.”

  “Not in a rising market. It makes sense to borrow as much as possible.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have somewhere in mind?”

  “I want to know what sort of place you’d like.”

  “I don’t know. Not too small. Around here somewhere. I don’t think I like basements.” He was uncomfortable. “What do you think? Yo
u’re the property consultant.”

  “There is a place near here.”

  “I knew it.” Now he was laughing.

  “Knew what?”

  “That you had a place in mind. I know you. You always have a plan.”

  “Not always.”

  “Yes, you do. It’s a good thing. You wouldn’t be Marcella without a plan.”

  “You wouldn’t be Benji with one.”

  “I have plans. Just not one plan.”

  “Sometimes I wish you’d have just one.”

  “Hey, Zanzibar girl! Never mind about my plans. They’re going fine.”

  “Well, you make it sound like I’m trying to run your life.”

  “So what about this place?”

  “OK, you’re sure you want to know?”

  “I’m sure.”

  The pizzas came and the waiter made his flourishes with the pepper pot. Most of the office workers had returned to their jobs and the tourists had not replaced them, preferring to sit inside away from the sun. We had outlasted the paler competition.

  “OK, it’s in Westbourne Grove above the Abyssinia restaurant. It’s got a huge living room with three big casement windows overlooking the road. A brand-new open-plan kitchen. Two bedrooms in the back where it’s quiet, overlooking a garden. High ceilings with the original mouldings. The bathroom’s nice too.”

  “Hey, slow down, you’re not selling it to me.”

  “No, it’s nice, Benji. They’re asking seventy thousand, but it’s not really on the market yet. It’ll go quickly. Do you want to see it?”

  “Right on Westbourne Grove? It’ll be a bit noisy and dirty.”

  “But it’s interesting to look out of the window. You can see down Queensway too.” I wanted to be right there, right in the middle of things.

  “OK, I’ll see it. Now eat your pizza.”