by Giles Foden
It was just as difficult to work out where, on the surface, the opening that gave the scanty light would be. He tried to triangulate it, but as soon as he was back up top, the geometry seemed different.
He began to build a search for the opening into his day. It was exhausting and his hand began to blister from using the panga in the forest. He was out there for hours over the next few days, chopping and stomping about, sweating and wild-eyed. The trees let through far more sunlight than he imagined, dappling him with fierce rays. His hair became bleached, his skin papery, a template for the sun’s experiments. Now he really wished he had brought some sun cream. He started to use the Mazo oil instead; except that he had knocked the bottle over while cutting one of his paths, and if he wasn’t careful he would find himself short of it for cooking.
Soon, he started to feel guilty about cutting down so much of the undergrowth. He told himself he must slow down, then laughed at himself for thinking this. Executive desert-island stress. It’s a cave, so what, no need to go nuts is there? Anyway, he had proper work to do.
He had, in fact, spotted some turtles, watched them laying eggs on the beach under a full moon. It was a glorious sight, a sight for the blessed, but all he could really think about was finding the opening to the cave. Other tasks, necessary ones like fishing, got done in double time. He was good at it now, pulling fat fish out of the water like rabbits from a magician’s hat, disdainful of his own skill. The garbage clearing and house tidying he simply abandoned. Cooking was routine now too. Fire, fish, oil, pan. He would suck on a lemon afterwards and savour the way his lips stung.
*
He never found the opening. He gave up the search. On what, he decided, would be his last evening on Lyly, he climbed to the top of the lighthouse. Almost as an afterthought, he picked up the can of paraffin oil and a box of matches on the way. Having climbed the thirty-three steps and entered the lamp room, he doused the wick with paraffin, pouring in most of the can. In spite of the years that must have passed, it lit almost immediately. He pulled down the mantle and reflectors and was dazzled by the light that suddenly flared. He had to leave the room.
The blindness stuck. On the way down, he nearly tripped and fell on the steps. He caught a splinter in his hand from the rail and barked his shin on the stone.
Swearing, he made his way outside. Night had fallen. He may have had a lighthouse, but right now he needed a flashlight. He used his cigarette lighter to guide him, cursing again when the flame scorched his thumb. And the lighthouse beam – it didn’t seem to be showing.
Back at the house he could see it, however. Something to do with angles. He lay down in the bedroom on his sleeping bag and sucked at the splinter in his thumb. Through a window frame, which also enclosed stars and a crescent moon, he watched the lighthouse cast its widening ray over the ocean till it faded and died. But he was dreaming by then, Nick Karolides, peaceful at last on the island of sleep.
*
Morning brought a pink, refulgent dawn, in the midst of which he walked round the island one last time, before seating himself by the stub of copper, which stuck out of the rock like the nib of a giant fountain pen. He must have stayed beside it for – what? Half an hour? An hour? Time was mysterious beside water, it seemed to him. It flowed in a different manner, taking on all the sea’s varieties of blue. By the shore it was pale and limpid, lighter than turquoise; further out it grew dark, more solid and inky, becoming almost black near the horizon. Shade after shade ran upon the surface, perpetually varying hues altering the general pattern.
Everything, as he sat there by the cable-end, came to his eye with meticulous definition. A large white bird, like a gull but different, landing on a tree nearby, seemed to show the very grain of its beak to him – and, no less definite, the scales of the small, steely fish that struggled in those yellow tongs. The bird walked along the branch and bent over its spiky nest. High-pitched sounds announced fledglings in the nest, puckered and urgent.
Was he himself, he wondered, still quite so hungry for alternative experience? He looked up into the sky as if it might furnish some answer. The morning light was stranger than he had thought. The flesh-pink shade had gone. A blood-orange colour was in the clouds now. He wondered if it meant a storm was coming.
He stood up, using the cable-end to push himself, and sighed like an old man. He turned his hand as he walked. The nub of the cable had left a mark on his palm. Cape Town–Durban–Dar– Zanzibar … the other names he couldn’t remember. His mind tried to plumb the network below, all those messages of the past. It struck him how, in history, so much was incalculable, so much was lost.
He went back to the cottage and began collecting up his stuff, feeling low. He was tired of being alone – not just here on Lyly, but generally. Walking down to the boat with his tanks strapped to his back, he thought about Miranda, teasing him for wearing them in Dar, and smiled at the memory. It was then he knew he would like to be around her some more.
15
– I thought that since your messages had got shorter and more infrequent you must be working hard. That I should leave you in peace. As for me, I’ve been considering my position here. Not sure if this job is right for my future happiness. Not challenging enough.
– I thought I had offended you and you were giving me the silent treatment!
– Not at all. By the way, that something you sent me underlined means it’s a hypertext link? It didn’t work.
– Works for me. What did you do?
– Just clicked it as normal.
– At the weekend I mean.
– Ate loads of spaghetti. I am now made of pasta.
– The Maid of Pasta. Bet you still look good.
– You wouldn’t say that if you caught a glimpse of my legs. Ape-woman. Am off to get them done now at the Kili. Catch you later.
* * *
– Who’ve you got your legs done for? Sugar and lemon juice sounds nice on a pancake but less nice to have torn off you. Don’t they have Imac? Is that what it’s called? As for your future happiness, I refer you to Nietzsche: The secret for harvesting from your life the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is to live dangerously. Fire walk with me.
–??????
* * *
– Have just been for drinks and cake at the Ocean Watch party in Stone Town. It is a reef protection charity. They had a cake in the shape of a fish. It wasn’t a very nice cake: too much sugar, not enough flavor. My friends Olivier, who is belgian and depressed, and Tim Catmull, who is British and british, came too. Sorry. can’t seem to be bothered to use the cap key. Will try harder. How are you Miranda? I feel sorry for you there in the middle of dusty Dar. Forgive me, I think I must be a little bit drunk. Not much news here. Would you like to come and visit me?
– I have a mouth ulcer. Ow ow ow. But if that doesn’t put you off, in answer to your question: yes! I’d like to see Zanzibar.
– Try pawpaw for the ulcer. Pleased that you are coming.
– Will do (pawpaw). Can I add, though, that you shouldn’t make anything of my visit?
– What you are talking about?
– Don’t get any ideas about a holiday romance.
– I see. Well, at least you are brutally honest. Hadn’t any, as a matter of fact.
* * *
– Nick?
– Sorry, been busy. Am not not writing to you.
– Do you still want me to come? Could do a long weekend.
16
With her hands around his hips, she felt odd sitting on the back of the motorbike. And none too safe, either, as they weaved through the narrow streets – her rucksack strapped crossways on the pillion, her hair streaming out behind. There was only one helmet, and it was too big for her when she tried it. In the end they both rode bare-headed; he tied the helmet to the pillion with little bungees.
She had thought a lot about seeing him again, conjuring the figure on the beach in her mind during their exchange of emails. Reality didn’t disappoint, and her
senses quickened when she saw him there waiting for her at the airport, smiling and bronzed, with the helmet under his arm. As they went out to his bike in the sunlit car park, all her smoky imaginings of what this moment would be like kindled into flame, springing spontaneously in the heart. Yet behind the glow of warm feelings, there was a warning voice telling her to be prudent, to keep her self-possession.
He took her for coffee at the Livingstonia Hotel. Two cannons at the entrance door. Very British. Very colonial. Inside was a weary snooker table and an age-dimmed indication in wood relief: The Ladies’ Powder Room. Two things rescued this run-down and slightly sad establishment, where even the hunting trophies looked mournful, as if the animals had known they were going to be killed. The first was a wonderful balcony, opening out to the sea, high above the rusty, corrugated-iron roofs of the town. The second was an old library, full of red and brown hardback English books with titles like Tales from the Mysterious East and Memoirs of the Boer War.
‘Ray would like it here,’ she said, as they peered through the glass of the dusty cabinets. The Effect of Tropical Light on the Skin of White Men. Fortune My Foe.
‘Who’s Ray?’
‘A guy at the embassy. He’s kind of a bookworm.’
‘Right,’ said Nick, nodding.
She wondered if he suspected Ray was a rival for her attentions, which was crazy, considering, but then he wouldn’t know. Yet the moment had already passed at which to put him at his ease… in any case, the insistence would have created too obvious an invitation.
She wasn’t sure if she herself liked Stone Town. Its crumbling coral houses seemed slightly hostile. Especially the former residence of Tippu Tip. Nick said Tippu Tip was a famous slave trader who had helped Livingstone and Stanley make their explorations. Now a private house, it had a large carved front door, in front of which sat an old bearded man in turban and robes. On the steps beside him, a noisy crowd of children were playing with wooden models of aeroplanes and cars. They were imitating the sounds of the engines, careening the models through the air close to the old man’s face. He remained unmoved.
They left the old man and snaked through the busy streets, under carved wooden balconies. Electricity cables were looped from house to house, and she worried they might hit one. From the doors of the Indian curio shops, some of which were studded with brass knobs or lines of cowrie shells, tourists emerged sporting old silver bracelets or cradling antique nautical instruments. She also saw basketfuls of crabs and shrimps, sitting in the open sunlight, their contents still twitching, and street vendors grilling chunks of squid or lobster on wooden skewers over charcoal fires. Everywhere was the smell of fish and spices and flowers. At one point the bike sped down a street whose surface was covered with hibiscus petals. Miranda guessed there must have been a wedding there, or some other kind of feast.
Further on, he stopped to show her some iron rings where slaves had been chained.
‘Is this where they were sold?’ she asked him, staring at the scarred old metal.
‘Don’t think so,’ he said, putting out a foot to steady the bike. ‘I heard a church was built on the site of the old market. I guess they just… kind of waited here.’
There was a pause during which she was conscious of his body in front of her, between her knees, and the hair on the nape of his neck. He kicked the pedal and restarted the engine.
The next place they visited was the Old Arab Fort, which a sign said had been built between 1698 and 1701. It was a large stone building with medieval-style battlements. It now contained a restaurant.
Over his shoulder, Nick said: ‘And Leggatt – he’s a British guy I met, maybe we’ll go see him – told me the Arabs built that on the site of a Portuguese church, so I guess it’s a case of what goes around comes around.’
They also visited an edifice called the House of Wonders. A large balustraded building with a clock tower and lots of tiers and fretwork, it had once been the Sultan’s ceremonial palace.
‘There’s a story that the skull of a slave was buried under each of those columns,’ he informed her, as they dismounted. ‘It’s going to be a museum, once the government finds the money to do it up.’
‘Everything here seems to be in transit,’ she observed, gazing at one of the columns.
‘How do you mean?’
‘On its way to becoming something else.’
He nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yeah. I guess. Polymorphous. Going through different stages.’
As he spoke, she couldn’t get the image of the suffering, despairing slaves out of her head. The columns, fluted and massive, were stone, not coral, and they must have had quartz or something in them since they glittered in a way she found malicious. Slavery seemed such a vast and forbidding area of human experience to consider that she was almost glad when an African businessman, wearing a suit and clutching a purple briefcase to his chest, rushed between her and the awful columns.
‘They don’t seem kind of, so poor here as on the mainland,’ she said, watching the man dash away.
‘Tourists,’ said Nick. ‘There’s more money coming in here now than ever. It’s the mainstay of the economy since the price of cloves went down.’
‘Why did it drop?’
‘I’m not sure. I’ll have to ask Leggatt. He’s a clove farmer. I think people used to smoke clove-flavoured cigarettes in the Far East and now they don’t.’
They remounted. He took her down Creek Road, past lines of fishermen carrying nets on their backs, to a place that really was a museum. Its exhibits included snakes in jars, Dr Livingstone’s medicine chest, and a skeleton said to be the bones of a dodo. They looked more like those of a large hound.
They spent some time looking at carved doors on a street of Arab houses. Larger, darker and more ornate than the ones on the Indian shops, which Miranda suspected must have been modern imitations, these doors were covered with black metal roundels and spikes. In between, curled lines of calligraphy were etched into the wood like some kind of code. The carving was very elaborate. It was hard to pull one’s eyes away from it, and the doors seemed to speak not only of all the labour absorbed in their making, but also of all the hours others might have spent looking at them. The geometric motifs themselves, she realised at once, expressed the logic and order of the Islamic world view: it was as if the repeating patterns and endless divisions were trying to represent God’s unchanging laws.
They got back on the bike and drove around a bit more. For all Nick’s efforts, Miranda still wasn’t that impressed by Stone Town. There was a sweltering, squalid quality to the place, and there were mosquitoes everywhere. The town didn’t conform to how she had imagined Zanzibar, which was, well – long white beach, spread of palms at the water’s edge, etc. Her mood wasn’t improved by a waiter in the restaurant they went to for dinner sneezing as he brought their food, nor by Nick’s awkward attempts to flatter her.
After eating, they went dancing at Spices Nite-Club. The live music – twangling, Afro-style guitars – cheered her up. As they whirled around together, the awkwardness lessened. She realised, as the music hummed about her ears, that she hadn’t danced since coming to Africa. At one point, when the music was appropriate, he held her hips. It excited her, she wanted to feel his hard chest’s weight on her – and it made her wonder, too, whether he just hoped for sex, or thought more of her.
They sat down and talked a little. In spite of the compliments, which kept coming, it was still quite hard to sense whether he was hopeful of anything serious developing. It was strange how men could be so closed off like that, voice and eyes ever alert to the betrayal of emotion. It was as if they were addicted to secrecy. Of course, women concealed their feelings too – it was a necessary part of life – but men seemed to do it as a matter of course, as if to open up at all made them entirely vulnerable.
By the time they arrived at the Macpherson – he’d booked a room for her there – the lights had gone out. They had to make their way to her chalet, guided only by N
ick’s cigarette lighter and the moon and stars coming down into the courtyard between the chalets, reflecting up off the pink coral gravel.
He sprung a tentative kiss on her cheek as they said goodnight on the step. Again, it was hard to read, in itself as much as in the semi-darkness. She could see his eyes well enough in the flame, and they were surely expectant.
Her wondering – that glorious uncertainty which affects all those whose hearts are stirring – took too long. His shoulder had already begun to turn as he made to go down the steps. She said goodnight a second time – he turned again, said goodnight once more himself – and then she went inside, shutting the door, perhaps a little slowly, perhaps a little slyly, behind her.
Moonlight, and a hushed sound of waves, filled the room. She went over to the French windows and stood for a moment, looking at the silvered sea: a mixture of pearl, soot and polished metal. The sky near the moon was illuminated by a skirt of clear, grey calmness; the rest was a deep, impenetrable black, utter but for the pinpoints of stars, which shone much more brightly than at home.
She thought of her father, her mind settling on the blue felt policeman’s cap he kept as a memento after leaving the job and which she still had. She had put the cap into storage for safe keeping when she came to Africa. Its main feature was the badge: ‘BOSTON POLICE’, silver letters on a blue background. There was a tiny emblem of Paul Revere on his horse between the words, commemorating his ride to warn the revolutionaries that the British were coming. Beneath ‘POLICE’ was the civic crest, a depiction of the city skyline from the harbour with three boats. Under that were the words Bostonia Condita AD 1630.
Her mother, who died when she was just three years old, might just as well have come from such a distant period of history. Everything about her was hazy. Whatever memory of a happy family Miranda retained came through her father. She remembered the smell of the cap and the cap remembered his smell: fried bacon, oil and exhaust, soap, tobacco, beer.