A Girl From Zanzibar

by Roger King

  “What?”

  “I just said I had a Zanzibari friend in America and mentioned your name. I asked Indians mostly. Some remembered you. They seemed to think you had married an Englishman.”

  “Well, they were wrong. Who said you could do that, anyway? What makes you think I want people to know what I’m doing? Or that I don’t want to be the one to tell them?” I pulled away my hand.

  “What harm could it do? They didn’t mind. I guess your family was quite prominent. There was something about your aunt. Being killed.”

  “Yes, Ron. There are always lots of stories on Zanzibar. I hope you didn’t gossip about me. Respected my privacy.”

  “I didn’t gossip. What’s to gossip about anyway? "You live so quietly. I told them you were a college professor of multi-cultural studies, that’s all. I didn’t think you’d mind that. You should go visit. I think people would like to see you.”

  I considered this man, with his blundering affection, and bloated self-regard, my closest colleague at Moore. The anger that welled up in me was out of proportion to his offense. It drew on all that was in my head. The way his arrival was not Benji’s arrival. The presumption of returning me to Zanzibar with so little understanding of the place. I could not imagine who his Indians might have been, how they might use the information, or how the Goans I had left behind would feel to hear of me that way. Supposing he had some drinks and talked of prison. Zanzibar should have been left alone, left separate, completely separate from Vermont. All the distress accumulated in me during the lonely summer was tapped and mixed with the disappointment of Ron simply being Ron, and not being the friend I needed. Five minutes of company in the last two weeks and it was already too much.

  “Actually, I do mind. You’ve no business ... Tell me what they said!”

  “Not much. They were interested. Polite. I didn’t think you’d take it like this.”

  “You didn’t? Of course they didn’t say much. What do you think words like ‘Professor of Multi-cultural Studies’ mean to them? They were wondering what you wanted, how to make use of you. You probably scared them. They probably thought you were crazy. Look, you must be tired. We can talk some other time.”

  “I don’t feel tired.”

  “Well, I do. Just thinking of you in Zanzibar makes me tired.”

  THERE WERE MORE COINCIDENCES IN MY BAYSWATERlife. One summer evening I was lingering over dinner with Benji and Ashraf, a purposeful ordinariness, when Kamara dropped in. I had come to see him less frequently with time. A sort of embarrassment had entered our friendship. I had become prosperous through property, while he, though also prospering in a smaller way, still claimed to be a socialist. He drank more heavily and we both knew that his job in local government had enmeshed him in corruption. His voice had stayed strong and the ironic laugh was the same, but he was less at ease and always ready to depart. I would try to make him stay longer, sorry to lose that part of my beginning at Hereford Road.

  On this occasion, he embraced me in the doorway, moved to Benji to shake hands, then stopped dead, his eyes on Ashraf.

  I said, “Oh, you haven’t met Ashraf, have you? Ashraf, this is Kamara.”

  Kamara said, “Do I know you?” with an uncharacteristic quiet and intensity.

  I looked to Ashraf, who leaned back in his chair and conceded, “I think you might.”

  “You ran the training camp in Libya. For West African freedom fighters.”

  “For a time. I remember you. You were being trained for Sierra Leone. You ran away.”

  “Not exactly. We were badly treated.”

  “It’s true. I don’t blame you.” To us, Ashraf explained, “I had a spell with Khaddafi after Uganda. Not a good situation. The Libyans really did not respect the West Africans. So, Kamara, did you win? What are you doing in London?”

  “I work here. It’s not finished in Sierra Leone. What are you doing here?”

  “Me? I’m having dinner with my good friends.” He put a hand on Benji’s shoulder. “All that was a long time ago.”

  “In a way.”

  I poured a glass of wine for Kamara and asked him if work was going well, if he was married yet. He said work was as always and that maybe there was someone who might be his wife one day. He drank the wine quickly and I could see he was running and that I could not stop him.

  After he had left, Ashraf stretched and laughed. “"You never know when you will run into your past.”

  “Did you know Kamara well?” asked Benji.

  “Not well. He didn’t last the training. He’s not a soldier.”

  There was this meeting with Kamara, then one other meeting, and then no more. The truth I left out of Ka- mara’s case, to make it part of theory, was the scared young man who missed his family and tried to find another one in London, who aspired to do great, selfless things that were impossible for him and clothed himself in irony. I omitted his humiliation and absented myself from his story. I wrote only of the African from a corrupt African country who gravitated in London towards a corruption similar to the one he’d fled, a failure to properly migrate.

  We were quiet for a time, and, unsettled by Kamara’s visit, I cleared the dishes. Benji followed me to the sink. “Nobody’s to blame,” he said. “Come back and join us.”

  When I did, Ashraf was studying the table top, lost in thought. Finally, he said, “Sometimes you can’t tell if you’re on the right side or the wrong side. I don’t fight for just anyone, you know. Sometimes I say, no. I remember Kamara. I liked him. I’m sure he believed in what he was doing.”

  Happy voices from the street rose through the summer-open windows. A passing bus rattled the glass. The phone rang. I walked to the kitchen counter to answer it, ruffling Benii’s hair as I went.

  “Hello?”

  “Is that Marcella?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Geoffrey. Geoffrey Sutton.”

  “Geoffrey! Of course I know which Geoffrey.” Benji caught my eye and smiled.

  “It’s been a long time. How are you, Marcella?” “Well, not too bad, you know. Yourself?”

  It had been a year or more. Geoffrey stopped phoning regularly after I started living with Benji. But I thought of him often. Argued with him, really, in my mind. Arguments such as: You thought I wouldn’t be able to make it in London without help from you or the government, but I have made it. You told me everyone would cheat me, but people have been generous. You told me I should do something useful instead of doing business, but look at everyone asking me for help. How many come to you for help, Geoffrey? I even pointed out to him, in my least worthy thoughts, that my home was far nicer than his dark cubbyhole, and that my car had so much more style than his bicycle. Geoffrey in Reading was the outrigger to my London canoe, something smaller and distant, but stable.

  Now that he was actually on the phone, I was just pleased to hear from him, a welcome trustworthy voice. He said, “I may be coming to London.”

  “This can’t be the first time, Geoffrey. You’re only half an hour away by train.”

  “No. I mean I may be moving there.”

  “You?” Why did this seem so impossible?

  “I’ve applied for a job at something called the Third World Foundation. 'You know they do the Third World Review section in The Guardian among other things. I’m going up to talk to them in two weeks time.”

  “That sounds wonderful.”

  “I wondered if you might like to meet. It seems ages since we saw each other.”

  An appealing scenario flashed through my mind. I would take him for a smart meal at Etty’s where everyone would greet me and he would see how popular I was and how well I’d done. I had a dress in mind. “I’ll take you out to dinner,” I said. “My treat. I owe you some meals.” “I’d love that. But you don’t have to treat me. Actually, I had another reason for calling. Do you remember the man who found me when I was hit over the head in Zanzibar? He said goodbye to us at the airport. An army officer.”

 
“Yes... David!”

  “Exactly. Well, he called me. He’s in England. He asked for your phone number and I gave it to him. I wondered if I’d done the right thing. Thought I’d better warn you.”

  “No, it’s all right, you don’t have to protect me, Geoffrey. My number’s in the directory anyway. Look, shall we talk when you come up? Say eight at Etty’s restaurant in Hereford Road? Two weeks? What day was it?”

  “Thursday. OK. Good.”

  “See you then, then. Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  I put the phone down, then looked over at Benji. “My predecessor,” he explained to Ashraf. “Still in love with her.”

  “Of course,” said Ashraf.

  THE EMPTINESS OF SUMMER IS SOON TO END. SOMEkeen students, or ones who hate their homes, are already back, hanging out on outside steps, making big, noisy greetings for new arrivals, hugging as if each was a miraculous survivor. I am more distant from them; in their absence Zanzibar has taken me away.

  Julia is among the keen ones. She turned up, unheralded, on my doorstep, certain of her welcome. A summer in Bangladesh has changed the way she looks. She is tanned, wears her clothes more loosely, seems taller, sexier.

  “Julia!” I embraced her, but my hug was measured now, holding away as much as holding to, no longer leaning towards the erosions of love. I did not brush her cheek or breathe her scent, with their hints of a mother’s tenderness.

  While I noticed this new restraint in me, Julia was oblivious. “It was incredible,” she said. “You were right. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”

  She told me how different it had looked from anything she had ever seen, and how different the customs were from anything she had ever known, how the hardship of the poor was unimaginable, yet the grace of their culture was undefeated. Nothing before, she said, had prepared her for the sight of ships in full sail passing through rice fields of luminous green, or a million brightly dressed Hindu pilgrims wading into the water, or the crowded swirl of the Dacca streets, the gaudy rickshaws with their emaciated drivers, the trouble taken in the market to make multi-coloured sculptures from spice powders.

  I listened, prompted, made tea for us, while she struggled to abandon the surface and find a lesson that might please me. “It made me realise,” she said, “how arbitrary our view of things is. How you can see everything from one place and understand it one way, and not realise that for other people in another place the same world looks entirely different. America was a fantasy place for poor Bangladeshis, powerful, cruel, invisible, a paradise for those who lived there. The girl who translated for me wanted me to take her with me. She really believed that everything would be perfect for her if she could just go to America. She had no idea of how difficult it would be for her.”

  It did not seem to occur to Julia that I might feel closer to that girl than to her, or that this cool assessment of foreign things might be an irritation. The course of summer had taken me from cool to hot and she could not have known that either. I shifted, asked her if she had met anyone special, certain that she had. Well, there had been this Australian volunteer, Paul. They had been working together at Bangladesh Rescue so intimately that it had soon been easy and natural to share a bed. From the smile she could not hide, I could tell that Paul had been a success in that bed.

  “What about you?” she now asked. “Did you find your old partner? Or someone new?”

  “Nobody new. I don’t know about my old partner. I have some leads.”

  It was unthinkable now, listening to Julia’s outsider tales, to confide in her about the newspaper clipping, and the urgency of the way the past was consuming me. How could she understand? Why couldn’t she have fallen passionately for a Bangladeshi while she was there, instead of an Australian do-gooder? She could have embroiled herself in difficult, dangerous situations that would have made individual Bangladeshis seem large and frightening, or large and powerful. She might have been rattled, touched, bloodied, cursed, been herself in need of rescue.

  All this came out only as “So, no Bangladeshi men, then?”

  “Oh, no. We were warned about that. It leads to trouble. It would have been unprofessional. We’re so much richer than they are.”

  I hugged Julia on the way out too. I knew my irritation was not fair. She’d gone from girl to woman in her summer. I’d gone from the present to the past. She said, on the doorstep, “I’m so grateful that you made me go. Nothing will ever be the same for me again.”

  In Westbourne Grove, the doorbell rang. “Gaby! What a nice surprise. I haven’t seen you for so long.”

  Instead of an embrace, she walked straight past, flopped onto my couch, and pulled off and threw down her nurse’s cap in a single movement. “Gabrielle, what’s the matter?” She was never like this, never rude or discomposed.

  “Nothing. Nothing’s the matter.”

  “There is! What is it? Tell me. Do you want some tea?” “Tea? No, I don’t think so. What is it that rich people have around this time? Cocktails? Gin and tonic, isn’t it?”

  “Gaby, I’ve never seen you like this. Have I done something?” I flashed through things I might have done or left undone: visits not made, a birthday forgotten, an accidental insult.

  “No, you haven’t done anything. I need you to do something. You’re a property developer, aren’t you? Along with Kamara and Adnam and everyone else. Everyone with their fingers in the pudding. You must know all the other property developers and their friends in the Westminster Conservative party.”

  “What are you talking about? You’re not making any sense. I hate the Conservatives. They ruined Porchester Baths.”

  “You and your precious Porchester Baths. Do you think that’s important? Three years ago you didn’t have a penny and now you’re upset because they redecorated your favourite sauna. Marcella, where is your head? How do you think you made your money? Only because the Conservatives were selling off poor people’s council houses. Kamara’s the same. Worse—he calls himself a socialist.”

  “And what is it you want this rich, corrupt person to do for you?”

  “Go to your friends and tell them to leave my hospital alone.”

  “What?”

  “They’re selling St Mary’s to their property developer friends. They’re knocking it down to build luxury flats for yuppies. I’ve worked there for six years. All the old people around Harrow Road know us. They depend on us. Often they were born there. Have you any idea how hard I’ve worked to keep giving people proper care in spite of the cuts? This was the only thing that made it all worthwhile to come halfway across the world and work my fingers to the bone. That the old people of Harrow Road appreciate me. They’re grateful. Ordinary, poor people. Black and white, it doesn’t matter. They send me Christmas cards with pictures of their grandchildren. It makes up for Thatcher and her racist friends not liking us. And for the wages. I can’t even afford my own rent since Monique left. You’re getting rich. Kamara’s getting rich. Everyone but me. And I work harder than any of you!”

  I stood over her, shocked and tongue-tied, while she refused to meet my eyes. Finally, she added in a quieter voice, “So, I need your help. That’s what friends are for, isn’t it? Tell your rich friends to leave St Mary’s alone.” I thought about all this. The unfairness of her accusations, and the unexpected connections she had made. It was true: I had done well from Thatcher’s boom even though I didn’t like her. I cooled myself from the tart replies that sprang to my lips and remembered Ga- brielle’s limitless generosity and kindness at Hereford Road. It was against her nature to assert herself in this angry way.

  I sat down next to her while she continued to look at her knees. “Gaby, I’m sorry. I know you put everything into that hospital. But I don’t have any influence at Westminster council. Tibu know that. They’re horrible people. None of our friends are involved in local politics. Their heads are all on the other side of the world.”

  “I know ... I know. I’m sorry, Marcella. I’m being stupi
d. I just don’t know who to be angry with, or what to do. So I’m angry with my best friend who I know will not be angry back at me. You see how hopeless I am? We’ve talked about going on strike, but they’d like that. You see what they are doing to the miners.”

  “I wish I could do something. Gaby, you know you can always stay here. I’ll never forget how you gave me a home when I first came to London.”

  She looked around. “Thanks. "Your flat is lovely, but I like having my own place. In any case, you already have a visitor.”

  “Oh, Ashraf. He’s just a friend of Benji’s.”

  “Another businessman?” She got up and walked to the window, looked at Westbourne Grove and Queensway. I decided not to elaborate on what Ashraf was.

  “You know what these are, Marcella?” Gabrielle had picked up one of my miniature ceramic pots from the windowsill and removed the lid, tilting the inside to catch the light. “Little wombs. You’ve filled your flat with little wombs. You want a child.”

  “No! I just like them!” I looked around, stabbed and suddenly alarmed. There were nearly a hundred pots and lacquered boxes. Did everyone see what Gabielle saw, a woman around thirty living with a man who wouldn’t marry her, so desperate for a baby and blind to it that she spent her spare time collecting little wombs? I felt my colour rising.

  Gabrielle turned and saw me stricken in the middle of the room and realised what she’d done. “Oh, Marcella, I’m sorry. My big mouth. I don’t know what I’m saying today. It’s this psychology training I have to take. It’s all nonsense. I’m so stupid.”

  She came to where I stood and put her arms round me. We hugged with damp cheeks and I was reminded again of how Gabrielle was my exact match in height and weight.

  “I didn’t mean any of those things,” she said. “We’re all proud of what you’ve done.”

  “What about you, Gaby? Don’t you want children?”

  “Me? If it happens. I’m scared. I have this bad tendency to want to look after people. I’m worried that if I have children there won’t be anything left of me. I think I’ll make a good aunt.”