Dancing in the Shadows of Love

by Judy Croome

‘I’ll read it to Granny Zahra,’ she says, when Lulu returns and places it on her desk.

  Lulu’s eyebrows lift in surprise. ‘From what you’ve said about her, I don’t think Dawud’s grandmother will enjoy it.’

  Jamila tells her the plan.

  ‘I’m going to save her,’ she bursts out. ‘She’s never been to an Earth Palace as long as I’ve been in the city. Not even this court!’

  ‘Maybe she has her reasons for not going to court,’ Lulu answers. ‘Maybe the Spirit King has failed her.’

  ‘She must have failed the Spirit King! I’m sure there’s some Great Error in her background. That’s why she keeps everyone at a distance,’ Jamila replies, surprised at the look Lulu slants in her direction. Those strange eyes, always distorted by the thick spectacles common to the Pale Ones with their poor vision, take on an intensity that almost disconcerts Jamila, until she realises that, despite her efforts, she’s not quite at ease with the girl’s difference.

  ‘Does it matter?’ Lulu asks.

  ‘That Granny Zahra has erred?’ Jamila remembers where Lulu has come from. ‘Oh no, dear,’ she says and, because she must be kind, she steels herself to jump up and give the Pale One a hug. ‘The Spirit King forgives all who make mistakes, so one’s past doesn’t matter.’

  ‘The way I heard it, we shouldn’t err at all.’

  ‘We err; that’s why we’re human.’

  ‘You haven’t made any Great Errors,’ Lulu says, shocked, as the possibility enters her mind. ‘Have you?’

  Jamila laughs at her shocked grimace. ‘Maybe a little error here and there,’ she concedes. ‘I’ve disclosed those to the Prior, though.’

  How right her words are! Her ‘Great Error,’ The Battle of the Balcony, is not such a big mistake after all. Unlike murder, or some other terrible crime, her desire is a mere human foible—the very reason why the Spirit King came to the Earth Palace. As the Eden Book promised, he suffered to free those that err, to save them by the grace of his love, as he saved Jamila.

  The last of the chains forged in guilt around Jamila’s heart disintegrate and she throws her head back to laugh with the lightness of freedom. Freedom from the consequences of one small deed that surely never hurt anyone. For the unhappiness she’s suffered these past years, as she waited and waited for Dawud to marry her, has been but a test.

  ‘I am free from error,’ she says and believes it. ‘Because of the Spirit King’s death and the Spirit King’s grace. As are you.’

  ‘Am I?’ Lulu asks, her tone quiet with the same despair Jamila saw in Granny Zahra as she waved goodbye to Dawud.

  Jamila remembers Prior Ajani told her Lulu’s crime involved a dead Controller. Pity floods her for the poor lost spirit of the Pale One, and she finds the strength to give Lulu that hug. Touched by the sudden tension of the body in her arms, she hugs her tighter until Lulu rewards her with an awkward hug in return.

  She steps back and beams her approval. ‘Of course you’re unstained by past mistakes,’ she says. ‘No one here at St Jerome cares about your past. We’re concerned with what you do for the rest of your life.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Lulu says, and stares out the window, into the garden where Enoch digs a hole to plant a new tree someone has donated to the court.

  A cedar tree, he tells Jamila when she asks.

  ‘That won’t grow here,’ she says. ‘You’re wasting your time planting it.’

  An almost-invisible smile softens his face. ‘Maybe not,’ he says. ‘But I can try.’

  He crushes a leaf between his long, elegant fingers and raises it to his nose, inhaling the fragrance deeply. He offers it to her. She frowns, disliking the clean, woody smell and the intimacy of his sticky fingers, covered in cedar-sap, under her nose. His eyes, too, make her nervous. Soft liquid pools, they invite her to dive deep. Briefly, she’s tempted, for she thinks she sees the phantom of a girl standing beneath a nova in them. She grasps for her fealty, the fealty she lost once before: on a balcony, tempted by her ezomo, tempted by Daren Samanya.

  But she learned from that lapse. She steps back, away from Enoch. She jerks her head out of his reach and so, again, her faith endures. When she looks back, she sees a pair of ordinary sea-grey eyes that watch her with a rude intensity.

  She turns and walks away.

  • • •

  She meets Chuki Samanya for some lunchtime retail therapy in an inconspicuous little boutique, tucked away in an arcade filled with street musicians wailing tunes of poverty and loss, and hawkers selling fruit and toffees and cigarettes. A discreet notice on the solid wood door proclaims that there’s more than a passage beyond it. Jamila hesitates. Chuki doesn’t. She opens it and, with bold steps, crosses the threshold. An assistant appears from nowhere to assess Jamila’s body with a glance. She leads them to a rail almost alive with a variety of colours and fabrics.

  ‘Dawud will like this on you,’ Chuki says.

  The hallowed atmosphere of the small room is fragrant with the cloying scent of the tuberoses tumbling from a tall crystal vase. This, combined with the haughty decorum of the shop assistant as she produces dress after dress for Chuki’s inspection, makes Jamila too awkward to point out that none of the items display a price tag. She is concerned at the pile of gowns put aside at Chuki’s nod.

  ‘How will I afford to pay?’ Jamila whispers.

  ‘My dear,’ Chuki exclaims, ‘we’re shopping for your trousseau. No Templeton wife would settle for less.’ An imperious flick of a wrist adds another frock. ‘Dawud won’t object. Will he?’

  A remembered whisper of Lulu’s words make her think that Dawud isn’t due back for weeks, and he left her money, but not enough to pay for all of this.

  ‘But…’ she stammers. She wants to say no, but she doesn’t want to loose Chuki’s friendship.

  ‘Oh, darling!’ Chuki lights a cigarette with a languid flick. ‘Felicity won’t mind. She’ll open an account for you. I’ve been a customer for years and I’ll stand surety until your Dawud comes back.’

  As if her concerns are absurd, Chuki laughs, a rich dark sound that coaxes Jamila into agreement and swallows her doubts. Chuki, born into the same privileged world as Dawud, must be aware of the expectations for a Templeton wife. Soon, she has let Chuki select a wardrobe of new clothes. Her reflection in the cheval mirror tells her she looks like a Jamila Templeton and nothing at all like a Jamila Johnson.

  She objects to the pink linen tunic, though, until Chuki and the shop assistant embarrass her with a mutual irritation at her gaucheness. Chuki stands up from the armchair—a sleek, twisted design of tubular chrome and leather Jamila privately finds hideous—and, with firm hands, turns her to face the mirror.

  ‘Pink is your colour,’ she says. ‘Soft, and gentle, and sweet, like you. And,’ she adds as her fingers skim up to play in Jamila’s hair and remove the hairpins so it falls in a straight golden curtain to her shoulders and frames her flushed cheeks and bright eyes, ‘you look like an angel. A sexy, golden angel.’ She laughs that laugh again.

  ‘I’m not sexy,’ Jamila mumbles, flushed with more than embarrassment, flushed with a volatile cocktail of emotions raised by Chuki’s touch.

  ‘You are. You don’t appreciate your own strengths,’ Chuki says and smiles in such a way Jamila’s heart thumps with surprise and a secret vanity forbidden to angels and women. ‘Daren says you’re beautiful.’ Chuki holds her gaze and with an idle stroke of a crimson-tipped finger brushes Jamila’s breast. ‘He’s never wrong about a woman.’

  All that exists for Jamila is the path Chuki burns across her flesh. Anticipation—or terror, she can’t tell—suspends her breath. She wants to pull away for it reminds her of another, more masculine, touch. When Chuki lifts her hand away and taps her pursed lips, Jamila begins to breathe again.

  ‘Dawud will be hungry for you when he comes back,’ Chuki says. ‘Except…’

  That pause reminds Jamila how she failed to seduce Dawud, the night he told her he was deserting her for The W
ar. ‘Except what?’ she asks.

  ‘You need a better bra. French. Lace, with a tiny satin bow. Here.’ She presses a fingertip between Jamila’s breasts.

  Jamila’s flush deepens. There had been nothing but measuring in Chuki’s earlier touch. Her callowness has made her misunderstand a casual physical contact between sophisticated women such as Chuki Samanya and her friends.

  ‘Do I?’ Thank the Spirit King she hadn’t reacted to the novelty of another woman’s touch on her body! There’s so much to learn, she cautions herself, before she’ll really be Chuki’s friend and at ease in her world.

  Her Spirit King, in his goodness, in his compassion, has given her a second chance. This time, she’ll make sure her life is perfect in every way. And Chuki Samanya is the one who can show her how to be that perfect and proper person.

  • • •

  With Chuki’s friendship to keep her busy, the days Dawud is away at war pass quickly, until it’s the Friday before he’s due home and not even a month until their wedding day. Jamila paces back to the window of the court office and peers out. Where is Chuki? She expects Chuki to arrive soon; she’s to pick Jamila up on her way home for what’s become a ritual dinner at the Samanya mansion. Jamila is wearing one of her new dresses, the pink linen one she didn’t like until Chuki endorsed it.

  She also wears one of those French bras today. Skimpy and uncomfortable, it plumps her breasts up so the neckline is less demure than it looked on the hanger. She can hardly wait to hear what Chuki says when she arrives.

  ‘You don’t like pink,’ Lulu says, when she arrives at the court office.

  ‘I didn’t,’ she replies, ‘but I do now. Chuki says it’s a good colour on me.’ A sudden uncertainty grips her. ‘Why? Don’t you think it suits me?’

  There’s a moment’s hesitation. ‘You look good,’ Lulu says, adding in her forthright way, ‘but you were fine before. More real, without all the makeup.’

  Jamila wants to take offence. But some undertone in Lulu’s manner, some tension around her mouth, tells her this: Lulu is jealous of the friendship she has with Chuki. She can’t help it. Her lips tip up in a small, satisfied smile; she’s sorry for Lulu’s unhappiness, she really is. What must life be for someone as afflicted as the Pale One? She, who has suffered too, regrets that Lulu has no other friends except her, Jamila. Rapture overtakes her; there is no space for regrets. How can there be regrets, when she has become so strong in her allegiance to the Spirit King that she holds the light of hope to such sad creatures as Lulu?

  But because she’ll never forget what unhappiness is, and she doesn’t forget her promise to be kind to others, she kills her smile and walks to stand next to Lulu.

  Lulu, hunched over the old, lumpy computer, has turned away from Jamila’s silence. With diligent attention to each name, she is typing the guest list. As Jamila touches her on the shoulder, Lulu jostles her knee on the edge of her desk and whispers a curse not quite soft enough for Jamila to ignore.

  ‘Don’t curse,’ she says. ‘The Eden Book forbids it.’ She doesn’t want anyone—not even the Pale One—to be as alone and friendless as she once was, before she found Chuki and Dawud and the Spirit King. She licks her lips, adding, ‘I have more friends than Chuki. You’re my friend too,’ and gives what she hopes is a reassuring smile.

  Lulu swivels in her chair and looks up at her. She must have found what she needed in Jamila’s expression for, with hardly any hesitation, she covers Jamila’s hand with her own and squeezes it tightly.

  ‘Thanks,’ she mumbles and turns back to her typing, but not before Jamila has time to see, and pity, the sheen of the tears Lulu can’t hide.

  Before she can say more, Enoch, dirty from his garden, ushers in an immaculate Chuki Samanya. Her chic ennui, as she peers round the comfortable court office, Jamila’s haven for so many years, lights a flicker of the old shame.

  ‘So this is where you work,’ Chuki drawls, her indolent surveillance of the room broken when her gaze falls on Lulu who, sensing her appraisal, pauses in the middle of her work to send a belligerent stare in Chuki’s direction.

  A caustic smell tickles Jamila’s nostrils and reminds her of the time Dawud took her to the warm water springs; there in the plains beyond the mountains surrounding the Old Sea City where the brackish water bubbled, hot and harsh and bitter. The smell must come from Enoch, she decides, some poisonous sulphuric insecticide he uses in the court garden.

  ‘You can go, Enoch,’ she says. ‘You’re not needed here.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asks. Before his eyes confuse her, she looks away from him, towards a bored Chuki who watches Enoch with a slight challenge colouring her face less attractive than Jamila has always thought it.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You can go.’

  He inclines his head and holds Lulu’s gaze until she sighs, hits the save button with an angry tap and pushes herself up from her desk to walk towards him. Polite as ever, he holds the door open, but she stops in the doorway and turns towards Chuki.

  ‘Jamila’s my friend,’ she snarls, her dancing eye, which Jamila tries so hard to ignore, hopping wildly. ‘Don’t hurt her.’ Before she can say more, Enoch spreads his long, elegant hands across her back and pushes her through the door. He slams it behind them and all that remains is the fading echo of an argument.

  ‘What was that about?’ Chuki says, her lips pinched inwards in silent affront.

  ‘She works here.’ Jamila, although touched by Lulu’s concern, is upset by Chuki’s annoyance. ‘Lulu’s a bit rough,’ she apologises, ‘but she means well.’ Jamila hesitates. ‘She’s been in prison.’ She relaxes with a shrill giggle as Chuki starts to laugh.

  ‘Oh, my Spirit King!’ she says to Jamila. ‘For a moment there I thought I’d come to a mad house!’ and her face is again that of the Chuki who is Jamila’s good friend.

  With a relieved smile, Jamila says, ‘She’s not so bad once you’re used to her.’

  ‘Well,’ Chuki says, ‘I hope she won’t be at your wedding.’ She shudders dramatically. ‘That ugly pale skin! That crazy evil eye! I swear by the Spirit King, if you invite a Pale One, your guests will run from the court before Dawud can say, “I do!”’

  ‘Oh,’ Jamila says. The guest list Lulu herself is busy typing has Lulu’s name right next to Prior Ajani’s name. ‘I haven’t decided yet.’ Before Chuki can frame any more awkward questions, she asks, ‘Dawud comes home Saturday. What shall we do?’

  ‘We’ll go to my house,’ Chuki says. ‘I want to spend some time alone with you. Some girl time,’ she adds. ‘Before you become a married woman and Dawud demands all of your spare time.’

  After the tension with Lulu, Chuki’s smile is so relaxed Jamila returns it with a dizzy grin. ‘Shall we go?’ she says and doesn’t even try to contain her anticipation: for, when she’s with Chuki, she’s as perfect, and as unimpeachable, as the beautiful people she admired for so many years. No longer separated by her shabby past she is, at last, one of them.

  Chapter 21

  Zahra

  “We know what we are, but we know not what we may be.”

  My time is close.

  My hair is grey and I smell of the wintergreen ointment I rub on my varicose veins when they ache, which, these days, is most of the time. My breasts, those silken sacs that my Daddy, and then my husband, had so loved to fondle, have long since succumbed to the cancer. When I undress, I stare at their flat, scarred remains on my chest. They got what they deserved, those pieces of flesh. Once the weapons of temptation that were Little Flower’s ezomo, now they are where they belong: ashes in a hospital’s hellish incinerator.

  I have been lonely. Lonelier than I could’ve imagined since I lost my husband Barry. He died twenty-five years ago but, except for the memories he left behind, he was gone from me long before then.

  And my son. My little Barry. Grace used to call him an angel and he never lost that smile in his eyes. It only gleamed with a different brightness when he brought a yo
ung woman home, nineteen to his twenty, and laden with his child in her belly.

  ‘You’re too young to marry,’ I said.

  ‘We’re in love, Ma. We want to marry.’

  I often think he must have been smiling, when they died, the two of them, in a distant land as they fought to save the lives of those wounded in a war that should never have begun and has yet to end.

  ‘People aren’t collateral damage, Ma,’ he said the day they left for South America, his face wrinkled with the same determination he used to climb up and down stairs that were bigger by far than he. ‘We want to help. It’ll be an adventure.’

  ‘Foolish boy,’ I snapped and buried my tears in the warm baby smell of my grandson Dawud. ‘Kiss your son goodbye.’

  His answer was a laugh, as reckless as always, and I never saw either of them again. But I had my grandson, as placid and malleable as his grandfather Barry.

  Until Dawud, too, decided he wanted to go to war.

  • • •

  Jamila is a fool. Since Dawud has gone, she presumes to save an essence as empty as mine. I laugh at her, so zealous in her calculated piety, and so blind. She’s a woman who knows what she wants, but she doesn’t realise how bleak her task is. Once, I had a chance of redemption. It died, more years ago than I care to remember, one moonlit night when a stranger turned his back on me.

  Even Prior Ajani, no longer young and new to the court, yet as eager as he ever was, accepts the loss of this essence of mine.

  He came to call soon after Grace had died and hasn’t stopped. I thought he’d come crusading as well, but he’s never asked why I haven’t returned to the court since the day of Grace’s memorial service.

  • • •

  ‘Hello, Mrs Templeton,’ he greeted when he saw me at work on the roses, when he called at the mansion after Grace died. ‘I’m glad I caught you at home.’

  The rose garden was Grace’s joy, when she lived in the mansion. I’d let it decay when I’d moped around Enoch and yearned for what never could be. After he had abandoned me, there was emptiness in me; beyond redemption, I filled the yawning abyss with small, meaningless tasks. I also tried to save a little of Grace’s light by tending the roses she loved so much.