Dancing in the Shadows of Love

by Judy Croome

  ‘I’m busy,’ I said. I turned my back on him and concentrated on the new shoots I pruned.

  ‘Grace would like seeing her roses so loved,’ he said.

  I ignored him, willing him to leave. I wanted him to leave, but the murmurs behind me stayed and took shape. His: jovial, it comforted and encouraged. An answer: brittle-edged and resistant. Curiosity made me turn.

  He helped a young girl climb out of the court car. She held herself stiffly and looked at the world from a wary face marred by bruises.

  When he saw I watched them, he introduced the girl. ‘I spoke to Grace about her,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said. I knew what he wanted and I was terrified. ‘Never.’

  ‘She needs help. Grace wanted to help.’

  I turned to the safety of my roses and snipped away some unwanted dead wood, which stopped them flowering as prolifically as they should.

  ‘Where’s Enoch?’ I asked.

  ‘He left,’ Prior Ajani said.

  ‘Where’s he gone?’

  I thought he wasn’t going to answer. ‘No place special,’ the Prior said. ‘There wasn’t much more he could do here at this time.’

  Little Flower let loose a solitary howl of pain. I smothered it with a particularly vicious snip of the secateurs and made no sound as I cut away the rotten branch. I couldn’t see the Prior, my back was towards him, but in the silence that followed, I sensed him weigh what he must say next.

  ‘Perhaps Enoch will be back.’ He hesitated. ‘One day.’

  I swung around to glare at him. ‘Don’t lie!’

  I bumped him out the way with a forceful stride and the young creature next to him flinched as I passed her. Little Flower, silent except for the weight of her unshed tears, saw her too. I stopped and examined the girl more closely. She stared back with Little Flower’s eyes, the same eyes that looked out of my mirror every day before Zahra was born, and every day since Grace has died.

  We stared at each other, we three: the young girl, Little Flower and me.

  ‘What’s your name, girl?’ I hadn’t listened to Prior Ajani’s introduction. If I had heard her name, she would’ve had more substance than the pale wraith that cowered behind the Prior.

  ‘Hope,’ she whispered.

  Such an incongruous name for such an abject creature. I wanted to laugh. Instead, I frowned and, with a finger under her chin, lifted her face to mine. The marks of her Daddy’s love were clear.

  ‘You’ll be safe here,’ Little Flower said to the child before I could stop her.

  I turned my frown on Prior Ajani and dared him to gloat. And, as I drew her away from his side, somehow I was not surprised to hear him say, although this time with certainty, ‘Enoch will come back, Little Flower. One day he’ll be back.’

  • • •

  In all the long, lonely years, Enoch never returned, although Little Flower waited and waited. The girl Hope left for a new life, long before The War killed my son Barry and his wife.

  Although Prior Ajani never came, as Jamila does, to read from the Eden Book in an attempt to save my essence, he often visited. He said he came to see how the girl Hope was. Later, when I’d moved from the mansion into the small cottage that had belonged to Grace, he still came.

  ‘I have someone new for you, Mrs T,’ he would call as he brought other young girls to me. They had different names and different faces but they were the same as the child called Hope. I took them all in, until they were strong enough to leave.

  Only Jamila stayed, but the stranger did not return.

  Chapter 22

  Lulu

  “I will weep no more.”

  Dawud has gone to war and I see less of Jamila. She begins most days with Chuki Samanya; more often than not, she ends them with the woman too. She’ll drive to the Samanya mansion after visiting Granny Zahra.

  I arrive at the court ahead of the official opening hours. Jamila has given me the keys so I don’t have to wait for her to open. On the days when the rain shrouds the old city in greyness, I’m grateful for her trust. But the times I enjoy the most are those days she arrives early enough to share her life with me. I always put the coffee on to percolate and lay out her work, so we can have extra, precious, minutes together before the work day starts.

  ‘The printer called to say the final invitations are ready,’ she says. ‘After I’ve fetched them, I can start delivering them.’

  ‘I’ll help you,’ I say.

  ‘You’re so sweet, Lulu,’ she replies. ‘Chuki’s already offered to help.’

  ‘That’s okay.’ I shrug and try not to hurt. I tell myself that at least I will share her wedding day. It’s not her fault that I have no one else, while she has other friends.

  Loneliness makes me grateful when Enoch also starts to arrive at the same time as I do. I’ll busy myself with routine chores—switching on the coffee percolator and computers, checking email, opening the snail mail—and he’ll reach into his leather jacket. He’ll pull out a rolled up newspaper, snapping the red elastic band loose and smoothing the paper out with long, firm strokes. He’ll sit at Jamila’s desk and read all the news, from births and obituaries to the death toll of all The Wars fought in all the corners of the world.

  We never say much, and we never talk about that day on the beach, or about what he reads in the papers. Yet, his presence comforts me.

  Since the day Chuki Samanya invaded the court with her urbane boredom, I’ve wondered what there was between her and Enoch. Where had they met before? He’d scared her, made her anxious, until Jamila banished us both from the office.

  ‘I want to stay,’ I’d said, even as he pushed me out the door and closed it to shut me off from her.

  ‘You can’t,’ Enoch had answered. ‘Prior Ajani needs you.’

  ‘Jamila needs me. She’s not safe with that woman.’

  ‘She’s as safe as she wants to be,’ he’d said, and her laughter had drifted over us. How could I argue with that? But I wondered what he knew of Jamila and her friend Chuki Samanya. And I wondered about him.

  Today, he sits slumped over the desk and scribbles copious notes in a thin, spidery script. Occasionally, he stops and flips through the pages of his newspaper as he searches out information. When he finds something that interests him, he bends his head and writes. Sometimes, he frowns as he writes and pushes the pencil hard into the pad, exorcising a turbid wrath. Other times, he nods and chuckles and sounds more like Prior Ajani than himself.

  Curiosity drives me to ask. I pour him a cup of coffee and stroll across to where he sits. As I place the cup at his elbow, I say, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I like to record history,’ he replies.

  ‘History?’

  ‘Today’s news is tomorrow’s history,’ he says, and flexes his tattooed fingers around his pencil as he adds, ‘A person’s history—or a country’s—can tell you a lot about them. You can see where they’ve come from and what future they choose to have.’

  The philosophical answer is so unexpected, so incongruous in one who looks like he does, with his long hair, his earrings and his tattoos that I bark out a laugh before I can stop myself. He laughs with me, as he did before, the day I met him, there in front of the wooden nova above the altar of St Jerome.

  ‘You don’t believe that I record history?’ he asks.

  ‘You don’t look the type.’

  ‘The type?’

  ‘You know. A nerd who likes history!’

  ‘Why can’t I be interested in history and philosophy?’

  ‘Uh—’ I sense a trap in his question, but I still forge ahead. ‘Only intellectuals care about dead people and old news.’

  He quirks his eyebrows and asks, although it is more of a statement, ‘You don’t think I’m an intellectual?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Enoch!’ I point to his leather jacket. ‘You’re a biker. A Hell’s Angel. Why would you care about world history or the boring lives of ordinary people?’

  ‘They’re not bor
ing to me,’ he says. His eyes fill with a challenge that echo my words back, before he adds, ‘Even though you look at my clothes and my tattoos and slot me into your prejudice.’

  ‘I didn’t mean—’ A flash in his eyes stops the lie. We both know I had meant it. I had judged him on what he looked like.

  ‘It’s easy, isn’t it?’

  ‘What is?’ I ask, but I concede what I’ve done. I’ve shown that I see the leather and the tattoos, the long hair and the biker before I see him, the essence of Enoch. How often have I complained that people judge me by what I look like and don’t see that my difference is no deeper than my colourless skin?

  His gaze does not waver over the rim of his coffee cup, until I blurt, ‘Okay! I’m sorry.’

  ‘You won’t judge,’ he says, ‘if you look with your inner eye. Let your heart’s voice speak. That’s where you’ll find the truth of the matter.’

  He replaces his cup on the tabletop, dips his head and continues to write. I am angry and ashamed. He’s shown a side of me that makes me doubt the pain I’ve suffered all my life. Was it real? How easily I deceived myself when a quiet lie made it comfortable to blame others for the barrenness of my memories.

  I cough to clear the obstruction in my throat. ‘So,’ I ask, ‘what do you like most? Human interest stories? Politics? Wars?’

  ‘All,’ he replies. ‘They’re intertwined.’

  I snort. ‘They are not. Someone like me can’t really stop a war. All that will happen is I’ll die for my country and be forgotten.’

  ‘You’d be surprised. Make different choices for yourself and you can give mankind a different history.’

  ‘Changing your life is difficult,’ I say. ‘If not impossible.’ I brood on the Spirit King who stripped me of normality even in my mother’s womb. How could I change that even if, incredibly, it could mean the end of another war?

  ‘It’s worth a try, isn’t it?’ Enoch asks me. ‘To learn to listen with the heart and come to know what love is.’

  I nod, the protests I want to make clamped behind my lips. If sweet Dalia couldn’t love me, who could? Perhaps Jamila, when she invites me to her wedding, or touches my shoulder and tells me Chuki Samanya isn’t her only friend. Chuki Samanya. The name heralds the scent of danger that shrouds Jamila.

  ‘I’m worried about Jamila,’ I say to Enoch.

  ‘Don’t be,’ he answers. He doesn’t lift his head. ‘She’ll write her own history. As we all do.’

  I clench my teeth to stop the angry words, but they spill out anyway. ‘I didn’t write my history.’ I pinch a piece of skin on my arm and jerk it. ‘I didn’t choose this. I was born with it! Do you think any sane person would choose to suffer this if we could all write our own lives?’

  ‘Your skin is your grace,’ he says and continues to write in that damned notebook until I want to snatch it away and force him to look at me, really look at me and what I have suffered through no choice of my own. A life empty of love and a life empty of hope.

  ‘It’s my nova,’ I shout. ‘It’s all that people ever see.’ Before my rage breaks the banks of my control, I run from the office. But, even as I flee, he captures me.

  ‘Nova or grace, Luyando, you can make the choice,’ he calls after me. ‘Remember how easy it is to judge others for what you yourself are capable of.’

  As I pause for breath in the nave of the court, I want to hate him for reminding me that I, too, have judged him by his difference.

  I remember the time when I believed Dalia loved me. When I felt loved even as I loved. There’d been peace around me then. The holding camp girls had no longer punished me and I had no longer hated them.

  All that hate because they had seen my skin colour but not my essence. Yet in the time of Dalia’s love, my difference hadn’t mattered to either them or me. Before love, the arrows of hate had flown between us. Back and forth, back and forth. But, when I was cushioned by love, I’d let the arrows of their hatred fall dead to the ground. I’d not bent to pick them up. Nor had I re-poisoned them with my own hatred, intending to hurl them back. No, I’d smiled and smiled in love. Over time, the others, my foes, had started to smile back and, eventually, our weapons had lain forgotten and unused at our feet.

  Until my friend, Dalia, had betrayed me and I began to hate once more.

  Here at the court in this Old Sea City, how can I hate when an undercurrent, dense and redolent with love, envelops me from all sides? It consumes me. There is no way to escape, but to stumble to the altar and prostrate myself on the cold stone floor, until my panic becomes peace and I can remember my hate, but neither suffer it nor feed it.

  ‘Have you hurt yourself, Lulu?’ Jamila speaks over me. I open my eyes and clash with her green gaze. There’s concern there, touched with an emptiness that wasn’t there before Dawud went to war.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say and feel foolish. ‘Look at all the different colours.’ I lift an arm and point up to the triforium gallery, with its stained glass arches lit by the morning sun. ‘They’re beautiful,’ I sigh. ‘I’ve never noticed before.’ I realise I speak the truth. Since I arrived at St Jerome I’ve cleaned the nave every day, but I’ve not seen the veiled beauty that’s been there, above me, all this time.

  Jamila briefly contorts herself. ‘The glass is dusty,’ she says. ‘And you’d better get up from the floor. You can’t lie down in the courthouse. Where’s your respect for the Spirit King?’

  ‘Leave her be.’ Prior Ajani peers over Jamila’s shoulder, his cheerful, chubby face visible over the top of a large cardboard box he carries. He bends, placing the box on the ground and, before either of us can guess his intentions, he lays on his back next to me.

  I turn my head, my cheek chafed by the rough slate. His round belly protrudes from the folds of his chuba to reveal a patterned shirt, in orange, pink, and lime-green flowers. He spreads his arms until the tips of his finger touch mine.

  ‘How beautiful,’ he sighs. ‘A symphony of different colours, dancing in harmony.’

  ‘Prior Ajani!’

  Jamila sounds distressed. I start to move, slow and sluggish, weighted by the essence of this place. Prior Ajani moves too, enough to clasp my wrist and prevent me from rising. ‘Stay,’ he says. ‘There’s also joy in watching a sunbeam. Where better than here?’ He turns his head, the few tufts of white hair that cover his baldness uncombed as usual, and now richly coloured with a reflection of the Spirit King’s Eidolon Warriors in victorious battle over the Levid.

  I start to laugh. I laugh so hard the sound floats upwards and mingles with the flickering colours as the sun rises higher and streams into the nave.

  Prior Ajani laughs too. I hear him say. ‘Join us, Jamila, and see what the Spirit King looks like from a different angle.’

  I stop when Jamila, tight-lipped, shakes her head and picks up the box he discarded. ‘This is…inappropriate,’ she says and disappears into the office.

  Prior Ajani and I lie in silence. Somehow, the colours have lost their lustre and I’m no longer at peace.

  ‘Not everyone believes the colours can dance,’ the old Prior murmurs. He rolls over with a groan. ‘And I shouldn’t be lying here at my age.’

  I spring upright and help him stand. ‘I like your shirt,’ I tease as I brush off the specks of dust on his chuba and rearrange it. It falls into neat folds and hides the brightness of the multi-coloured flowers adorning the shirt he wears beneath it.

  Another laugh rocks him back on his feet. ‘I like colours,’ he says. ‘The Spirit King doesn’t only live in black and white.’

  I shrug, uncomfortable as I remember Jamila’s disquiet, but stay to watch the last of the colours fade from the altar as the sun rises too high to shine into the nave. As suddenly as they appeared, they’re gone. If I hadn’t witnessed it myself but a few moments ago, I wouldn’t have dreamt such beauty existed.

  The Spirit King-figure on the nova draws my gaze. Had I known this beauty before? Had it ever existed? Or had I missed seeing
it in the despair of life’s realities? I hear Enoch’s words echo in my mind. Nova or grace, Luyando, you must make your choice. Have I looked only at the pain of my skin—my life—for so long I’m no longer able to see that the colour of love depends on what view I choose?

  This maelstrom of uncertainty has beckoned before, a black tide that reaches out from the altar and pours down from the wooden nova. It threatens me, as Enoch did, the day on the beach when I forgot myself enough to cry into his cedar-scented embrace.

  Oblivion roils within me; it comes from my depths. Does it seek to destroy the incandescent colours that dance together despite their differences? Or does it seek to make me one with their beauty? Either way, the limbo that traps me keeps me standing in the shadows, unable to dance in the colours of love that await my discovery.

  Enoch saw the truth about me that day on the beach: until I can love, I am not free. I am merely out of prison.

  Aware of how the sun lights up the colours that live in the windows of St Jerome’s court, I begin to hunger. Can the sun rise and scorch away the ezomo of my skin, so that I am free of the loveless cage I’ve lived in for longer than I can remember?

  ‘It’ll be all right.’ Prior Ajani is before me. He digs under his voluminous chuba to find a handkerchief and dabs at my face, damp with tears I do not feel. ‘Learn to trust again.’ Cool with the wisdom of the ages, his whisper reaches me through the fog that ebbs and flows around me.

  ‘Trust who?’ I sigh back and remember Enoch and the old flower seller, before she melted away into my history.

  ‘Love,’ the old Prior says, and glances towards the wooden nova that stares down, but with a suggestion of a smile on its carved lips. ‘Trust what’s in your heart,’ he adds.

  Prior Ajani stretches to touch, but not touch, my chest, above where my heart pulses in a quickening rhythm. ‘Love is here,’ he says, ‘in you.’ He pulls his hand away, placing it open-palmed on his own chest. ‘It’s in me…in all of us…if we can see true.’