She took the clear, blue plastic container and lifted it to her lips. A small trail of droplets ran from the corner of her mouth and dripped on to the bedsheet.
He continued. ‘They say the city is over three thousand years old. The people there tell a story of a king of Hasankeyf who built a bridge across the river to join his city with Biltiskeyf, which lay on the far bank. The bridge would take twenty years to build. As he grew older, the king entrusted the project to his only son. Each day his son would ride his stallion to the other side, directing masons and engineers. Evenings, he was the guest of the ruler of Biltiskeyf and his daughter. She had eyes of mauve, like the edges of a sunrise, and every morning the son would stand at the top of the cliffs, waiting for that brief moment when the sky lightened and the sun’s edge touched the horizon, so he could catch a glimpse of that colour. Secretly, they became lovers. They dreamed that the bridge would unite their two nations, allowing them to build a life together.’ He stopped, self-conscious.
‘That’s how they tell the story anyway,’ he added quietly. The first orange rays of the tropic day broke through the trees and fragmented across the walls of the caravan. She faced him, propped on her elbow again, watching him. Her hair fell over and between her breasts.
He continued. ‘But as the bridge moved close to completion, the old king grew increasingly senile and suspicious. He accused the king of Biltiskeyf of plotting against him to take over and rule both cities once the bridge was completed. As the days passed, his paranoia boiled inside him, conjuring ever more improbable conspiracies. One night, in a drunken rage, he ordered the bridge destroyed. That night, his soldiers tore down twenty years’ work of a thousand men, pulling out the supports, and undermining the great buttresses. You can still see the remains of the stonework. He forbade his son from ever seeing his lover again. That morning, after watching the sun rise and glimpsing again the mauve of her eyes, he rode his charger off the cliff and into the river gorge. They say it took him a full minute to fall.’
He looked away, and then down at the floor.
She ran her hand gently through his hair and across the back of his neck. ‘What do you think about that?’ she said in a whisper. ‘Dying for love.’
He looked out of the caravan window, into the virid depth of the forest. He had waited for this moment for so long and yet now he dreaded it. Doubt flared within him like a virus, mutating, multiplying, eroding. ‘What else is there, Helena?’
‘I don’t know. Elephants, perhaps.’ She kissed the back of his neck and got out of bed. ‘Maybe you just have to find what matters most and live for it.’
She got out of bed and stood naked in front of the small mirror, brushing her hair. Her head was tilted to one side as she pulled the brush down with even strokes. He lay watching her athlete’s body, the pale skin like water flowing over bleached river stone. He hoped they would be together for a long time.
The morning sun had started to warm the little caravan. She was dressing now, carefully, for her nuptials. He watched her pull a skirt over a long, tanned calf, over the bony knees. The slightest of brassieres.
She stopped dressing and turned to face him. He looked into her eyes. ‘Tell me about those girls,’ she said. ‘The village girls you slept with.’ She was dressed now, in a long white skirt and fitted white jacket with white pumps. Her head touched the roof of the caravan.
He looked down, tried to hide the blood burning in his face. ‘Girl,’ he said. ‘Just the once.’ He could remember it even now, walking back through the darkened village afterwards, feeling physically ill, promising himself he would never do it again.
‘OK. Girl. Tell me. I need to know.’
‘I wrote it in the letters,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Was she very young?’ She was looking at herself in the mirror, applying shadow to her eyelids.
‘I didn’t ask her age.’
‘What was her name, then? At least you asked her name?’
‘Not now, Helena.’
She closed her eyes a long moment. ‘I don’t understand how their fathers do such a thing.’
‘It’s a different world, Helena. Don’t judge it.’
‘I’m not.’ She was applying lipstick now, a pale blush. ‘I’m judging you.’ She was staring at him, back through the mirror, a harsh inversion. ‘I’m going to Zimbabwe,’ she said.
He turned to face her, unsure of what he had just heard. ‘What did you say?’
‘As soon as the honeymoon is over. I’ve accepted a position with an NGO there.’
He sat, mouth open, uncomprehending.
‘I wanted to tell you, but a letter wouldn’t have reached you in time. I’ll be working in a wildlife rescue centre in Hwange National Park.’
He sat in the suddenly unbearable closeness of the caravan, all his plans crumbling into red laterite, worthless, barren soil. ‘You know that I won’t be finished here until Christmas.’
She stood, smoothed her skirt. ‘I didn’t plan it. I was going to join you, Warren. I was going to drop everything and come to be with you. But after I got your letter, well, I started looking. I’ve already made the commitment. It’s only three months. You can join me when you finish, if you want to.’
‘Jesus, Hel, I thought…’ He stopped short. What had he thought? That she would come here, forgive everything, marry him, live with him, as if nothing had happened?
‘You should dress, we have to leave soon.’ She was crying, crying on her wedding day.
A Wedding
‘We are here to be married,’ he said, pushing the stamped and sealed Notice of Wedding form towards the Justice of the Peace, who sat slumped behind his desk, white-haired head on folded arms. An old rotary phone perched at the edge of the desk, its cord coiled on the floor, disconnected. A ceiling fan clicked slowly overhead. Green hospital paint peeled from the walls, institutional grey beneath. A lizard scurried across the cinderblock, darting between the bands of light and shade streaming through the shuttered windows. And from the schoolyard next door, the shrieks of children playing.
Kwesi said something in Twi and the Justice lifted his head from the desk. His eyes were bloodshot and his breath reeked of alcohol. He looked at the paper, as if in search of some missing approval, and then nodded and put out his hand, the signal to sit.
They sat in chairs facing the desk. Kwesi and the men of his rig crew stood in a semi-circle behind them.
The Justice opened a desk drawer and retrieved an elaborate form adorned with swathes of blue, and a red, black and yellow crest – the Ghanaian coat of arms. He placed the form on the desk and reached out to a glass jar crammed full of pens and pencils. His deeply veined hand trembled and shook, and for a moment, it appeared he would be unable to close his fingers around one of the implements. Finally, he succeeded in drawing a Bic ballpoint pen from the jar. Coagulated blue ink balled around the pen’s nib. The Justice looked up and said:
‘Name.’
They spelled their names out slowly, the man registering their commitment in unsteady and illegible handwriting. After the form was complete, he opened a small book and read in a deep, gravelled voice:
‘Do you, Helena Dubois, take this man to be your husband?’
‘I do,’ she answered, squeezing the young engineer’s hand and looking into his eyes.
‘Will you love, honour and obey him till death do you part?’
‘I will,’ she said, glancing up at him.
And then the Justice asked the young engineer if he would spend the rest of his life with this one woman, or at least give it his best shot, and do his utmost to protect her and provide for her and her children, and care for her and live up to all of her expectations of what life should bring, and stay with her even if she were to fall ill, or go insane and forget his name and slowly grow incapable of even the most basic functions, just as his grandmother had when he was still a boy … And he looked at this creature who he hardly knew and he realised that he felt no fear. The trepidat
ion and hurt of before were gone. There was no panic in him and no urge to flight, and when he said yes, and it was done, and the man pronounced them wed, he realised that it was the easiest thing he had ever done. But he did not know why it was so, only that it was.
They signed the register and then they kissed. The Ghanaians, the men he worked with, their witnesses today, shot big, white toothy grins. He shook each of their hands in turn, in the way they had taught him: grip, clasp, and slip into a snap of second finger and thumb. They laughed every time he did it. She kissed each of the Ghanaians. She towered over the stocky Africans, her ivory skirt flowing in the breeze. Everything about her was contrast, her skin pale against the deep-red earth of the town, wedding white accentuating the black of the men’s faces and arms, the arctic blue of her irises reflected in their own murky tannin eyes.
They all drove down to the Elmina hotel, a hopeful collection of decaying buildings built in the 1970s for tourists who never came. Waiters in greying threadbare livery met them in the empty gravelled courtyard and showed them to a table on the outdoor patio that overlooked the beach and the aquamarine sweep of the bay. The breeze carried the smells of the sea, iodine and chlorine, amino acids searching to combine. Palm fronds swayed above them.
Helena sat on his right, the sole female in a system of men. Drinks were poured and toasts made. Kwesi wished them long life and many children and they all laughed and smiled at her. Then Kwesi produced a small figure carved in ebony and waved it above the newly married couple. He offered it to Helena.
‘This is from all of us to you,’ he said. ‘It is the fertility goddess Akua’ba. This is the real one, from the juju-man who has put into it the real power of juju. It will give you many babies.’
Helena took the statue from Kwesi and looked at it carefully. And then she stood and leaned over and kissed him on both cheeks.
After the meal, the men chatted and smoked, each of them glancing almost too frequently at the pale, beautiful woman in their midst. More drinks were ordered and each of the men rose in turn to make a toast, those assembled dissolving into laughter before each speech was finished. Kwesi disappeared and returned a few minutes later with a huge silver ghetto-blaster under his arm, which he deployed on the ground at the far end of the table. He popped in a cassette, and soon the Ghanaians were up, swaying to the African rhythms. It wasn’t long before Helena joined them, and the young engineer leaned back in his chair and watched her dance among the black men, their smiles as pale as her skirt, her dilated pupils as dark as their skin.
By the time the Ghanaians made to leave, the sky had already begun its nocturnal transformation, sky-blue to mauve and then star-blasted night. Kwesi wished them good luck and the men wove their way towards the parking lot.
The young engineer signed the bill to the room and tipped the waiters. Fingers entwined, they followed the stonework path, past the main building with its peeling shutters and rusting iron roof, towards the bungalows scattered amid a grove of tall, ring-trunked coconut trees that stretched away along the beach. The lights of Elmina Fort blinked in the distance. Waves rolled on to the beach, the surf a phosphorescent froth that lit the way to some distant point they could neither see nor sense. Beyond, the sea was as black and imponderable as an imploding star, with only the constellations above to provide reference.
Where the path jogged inland towards the first bungalows, they turned towards the water. They walked along the beach for a while, baby fingers hooked together, shoes hanging from free hands. The water rose to embrace them, the surf flowing cool over their feet and ankles before sliding back down the beach to gather strength for another caress. A rising land breeze blew across their necks and faces, warm and insistent, rich with the smells of earth and woodsmoke. Yellow porch lights shuddered among the arching trunks.
The bungalow was capped with a sloping tin roof and skirted on two sides by covered verandas. He unlocked the door, opened it and searched the inside wall for the light switch. A single lamp in the far corner of the room flickered to life under a dingy yellow shade, a ceiling fan spun in an irregular orbit. The bed had been turned down and the windows thrown open. White curtains streamed and fluttered.
He took her by the waist and pulled her to him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. Her body was supple and strong. He slid her skirt down over her hips and let it fall to the floor. With a step and a little kick, she sent it sweeping across the tiles.
‘Let’s see if the juju works,’ she whispered.
The Gulf of Guinea
He woke early, put on shorts and a T-shirt, slipped out into the cool stillness of the morning.
The sky was clear. He looked down along the gentle curve of the white-sand beach, towards the far point, the old Portuguese slaving fort and the outlet of the muddy Pra river beyond. Fishermen sat on the beach next to long dug-out boats, picking through their nets. Small piles of newly caught silver fish flipped on the sand nearby. The fort looked to be about five kilometres away, and he set out at a slow run along the beach, oscillating between the washed-up jetsam of the high-water mark and the edge of the surf, trying to keep to the hard sand, where the running was easiest.
It was good to run again, to feel the oxygen-rich blood pumping into his muscles and the sweat leach the toxins from his flesh. Despite a night where sleep had come only in intermittent swoons, he felt strong and fresh. He passed some fishermen carrying a boat up the beach. They watched as he ran by, called out to him. He kept going. Further on, a group of small boys clustered excitedly around a just-landed net that squirmed and flashed on the sand, its silver prisoners thrashing against each other in futile attempts at escape. The boys looked up and smiled at him. One of them, with dark dreadlocked hair and mahogany skin, much lighter than the others, waved at him. His features were more Arab than African. The young engineer looked away and accelerated down the beach, tried to run his head clear. But the harder he ran, the faster he went, the stronger the images became, until the beach seemed to fill with children running and playing, and everywhere he looked, they stared up at him with eyes full of questions, their hands outstretched towards him, beckoning, crying out to him, bibini, bibini.
By the time he returned to the bungalow, he was breathing hard and sweating heavily. She sat in a wood-frame woven palm chair on the veranda with a book in her lap. A long, blue-and-green patterned sundress flowed around her. She looked up at him from under a wide-brimmed white hat. The blue of sky and sea seemed to be gathered and made temperate by her eyes.
‘Good morning, baby,’ she said as he approached. ‘How was your run?’
‘Hard,’ he said, bent over, hands on knees, breathing deeply. ‘What are you reading?’
She flipped the book up to show him the cover. ‘Candide. I read it in school, but I would like to read it again, with older eyes.’
‘How are you this morning?’
‘Happy and in love,’ she said. ‘Also tired and sore.’ She smiled and laughed. ‘How many little deaths can a person endure, I wonder?’
After breakfast, they decided to walk down the beach and visit Elmina Fort. They packed a water bottle each, some sandwiches from the kitchen and the beach towels into their small daypacks. By mid-morning, they stood at the base of the outer wall and looked up at the main tower.
The tour lasted most of two hours. Their guide, a short, stocky man with a pockmarked face and misshapen lower lip who introduced himself as Kofi – born on Friday – led them through the tortured history of the area. The fort provided the stratigraphy and landscape of the story. Kofi spoke an awkward formal English, as if reading from a university history text, full of nested sub-clauses. He said things like, ‘In addition to their headquarters at Elmina, here where you stand presently, the Portuguese built forts at Axim and Shama, which, like Elmina Castle, can still be seen today; and also at Accra, though sadly and unfortunately for them, the Ga, a local war-like tribe, not at all like the friendly Akim of this area, of which I am a direct and hap
py descendant, incidentally, captured and destroyed the Accra fort in fifteen seventy-six,’ which made Helena giggle and hide her face in her hands, lest she would offend him or hurt his feelings.
Deep in the bowels of the fortress, the air was cool and dank. Helena shivered in her thin dress. He put his arms around her and held her close. Born on Friday told them how the slaves would arrive shackled in long columns driven by their Ashanti owners and be transferred to the European masters, who would then sex them and herd them into these deep, airless stone dungeons. Here they would stay, with barely enough room to stand, wading in their own filth, the dead expunged every few days, until the slave ships arrived to carry them across the sea. Sometimes they waited months. Kofi pointed to a line that had been painted on the wall of the cell, some two metres above the floor. He said: ‘When the fort was restored the year before last, the workers, including my own cousin, found a layer of dried and hardened excrement that had built up on the floor over the years. That line shows the level of the floor before they started digging.’
After the tour, they stood on the battlements and looked out over the small boat harbour and across the water, warming themselves in the sun. They could see the muddy stain where the river discharged into the sea, a huge brown fan of roiling sediment. Towering white cumulus now crowded the horizon and a sea breeze was rising. He thanked Kofi and tipped him a couple of thousand cedi. Helena was quiet and he did not try to speak with her.
After a while, she said: ‘I want to be surrounded by the sea. Let’s swim.’
They walked to a small cove on the lee side of the point. The water was calm and blue, and in the shelter of the fort, the air was still and hot. They drank some water, shared a banana from her pack, and stripped down to their swimsuits. She wore a microscopic two-piece that she had obviously been saving for him, and mirrored black racing goggles whose raw functionality seemed completely incongruous with the frivolous sex-toy look of her bikini. Despite the depleted ache in his groin, he felt himself harden. But before he could press himself against her and give her proof of his arousal, she was running out into the water, skipping over the waves with long, athletic strides.
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