by Giles Foden
‘Well, that is the way of it,’ said the captain. ‘At least you didn’t drown!’
He went back up on deck. Nick spooned the last of the spaghetti hoops into his mouth and looked wretchedly at the picture of the naked woman. Beira? What use was Beira to him? He listened to the churn of the propellers and – pulling the yeasty blankets about him – wondered where he had gone wrong in his life.
A little later, the captain came down again with a bundle of clothes.
‘You better put these on. I’ve had an idea, but it will take a little effort on your part.’
‘What?’ Nick asked, clutching at the clothes the captain was flinging at him. A pair of canvas trousers. An old blue sweater. A pair of rubber boots.
‘Well, we can’t put into Stone Town harbour, it’s hard enough for us to make a profit as it is. But we could stop just outside of it. And well, we have your little boat and I don’t see why we couldn’t find you a new pair of oars.’
‘You mean, row in?’
‘I do indeed,’ said Captain Phillipos. ‘We’ll be going by Stone Town in about two hours’ time. One of my men will clean up your dinghy.’
‘To be honest,’ said Nick, putting a leg into the canvas trousers, ‘it would be more useful if you could drop me at Ras Macpherson. That’s Macpherson’s Point, north of Stone Town.’
The captain shook his head. ‘Never heard of it. But I’ll look on my chart.’
With that Captain Phillipos climbed the stairs. Pulling on the high rubber boots, Nick followed him up, emerging onto the sunlit deck. At first the crew, dark men with hard-lined faces, eyed him warily in his ill-fitting seaman’s kit. The ocean swelled gently around the rusty old ship. Up on the foredeck, a scowling man was emptying Nick’s dinghy of water.
Then one of them said, in Greek, ‘He looks like a circus performer.’
‘Well, they’re your clothes,’ replied Nick, in the same language. ‘And they don’t smell too good.’
They all laughed, pointing at the man cleaning Nick’s dinghy. It was his kit. His sombre face brightened as he joined in the laughter.
The crewmen spoiled Nick after that, giving him chocolate and cigarettes and asking him about his family. He played up the story of his father’s and grandfather’s lives a bit, but they didn’t question the truth of what he told them. An assumption of common experience – of the Greek merchant marine and its tough, ancient history – ran through the conversation. Nick felt proud to be accepted by these men. There was a touch of fable about them.
Later, Captain Phillipos emerged from his wheelhouse to confirm that he would drop Nick off at Ras Macpherson.
‘You’ll have to make your own way through the reef, though. I can’t risk going into the lagoon. Fetch some oars, Eleutherios. Our visitor will be leaving us soon.’
Nick went up to the stern. The day was almost over and the sun was setting. He leaned on the taffrail and looked out hopefully for Zanzibar. In a cloud of diesel fumes, the Pearl of the Ocean continued. The waves darkened, chopping black under the golden light.
28
It was evening, and Miranda was drinking rum and coke alone at the Macpherson. She shook the ice in the glass and remembered, regretfully, the time at Leggatt’s farm when Nick had been drinking with the old man and she had allowed herself to drift away from him.
On the television, President Clinton was dealing with some personal issues of his own. Earlier in the day, he had testified to a federal grand jury for over four hours as part of the investigation into whether he had perjured himself or tried to persuade others to perjure themselves.
‘I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate,’ he said, from the White House Map Room. ‘In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse of judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible. I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression …’
Miranda’s eye wandered past the President’s grim face to the historic room behind him. It was in the Map Room, the CNN reporter had said earlier, that Franklin Roosevelt had directed Allied forces in wartime – ‘liaising with British leader Winston Churchill in his own Cabinet War Rooms in London’.
It made her think of the dead Englishman’s boat. And of Leggatt himself: his upturned face, the missing ear, the striations beneath the skin where the maggots had begun burrowing across his cheek and neck.
‘Now is the time – in fact, it is past time – to move on. And so tonight I ask you to turn away from the spectacle of the past seven months, to repair …’
* * *
In Florida, Mrs Karolides, Nick’s mother, was one of millions watching the speech across America. The TV flickered with the President’s contrite countenance. Above her a standard lamp produced more honest light. She wasn’t paying much attention to the broadcast anyway. Her hands were busy, and she was thinking about her son. It worried her terribly that she hadn’t heard from him since the bombings. Even though she knew that they had happened on the African mainland and not on Zanzibar, it seemed very near when she looked in the atlas. The news of the outrages had, in fact, shocked her from her customary religious stupor. These days she was having nothing to do with her crazy church. She had even put away her shrine.
She was thinking about Dino, too. He had been so kind to her in the past few months. And she was thinking about her work. The floor of the lounge was littered with tissue paper, starched cotton, waxed crepe paper and coloured cellophane. Beside her on the sofa were a pair of scissors, some wire cutters, a roll of sticky tape, and some coils of garden wire. On her knees was a book, A Step-by-Step Guide to Making Artificial Flowers.
‘The flowers in this book were all inspired by real flowers, but are not meant to be an imitation of them,’ she read. ‘People will not walk into your house, touch the flowers you have made and ask, “Are they real?” But they will certainly be impressed …
‘You can’t improve on Nature, everyone knows that. But, by developing an awareness of the possibilities, you can make flowers that look nearly natural from materials that might otherwise be wasted.’
On screen, a cluster of experts were picking over the President’s address. ‘It’s a question of trust,’ declared one of the talking heads. ‘He’s broken his contract with the public. And once that connection is severed …’
* * *
Miranda turned off the television and began walking towards her (or, as it was, Nick’s) room. She made her way across the Macpherson’s tree-lined courtyard, past the beds of hibiscus and jasmine, thinking how she hated the kind of two-bit wiseacres the networks wheeled on. She hated TV in general, anyway. Its breathless coverage of the bombings had been a disgrace. Far more powerful, in its odd way, was a headline in one of the Tanzanian papers, recounting the last words of a woman who had died after being pulled from the ruins. ‘Kuta zimebomoka.’ The walls have fallen down.
* * *
Mrs Karolides listened as one of the experts catalogued the gifts the President had given Ms Lewinsky last Christmas. A stuffed animal, a New York skyline pin, a Rockettes blanket, a pair of novelty sunglasses, a marble sculpture of a bear’s head … What on earth could she want with any of these trashy items? Why would anyone want them? She shut off the foolish babble with the remote and looked to her book again.
‘Determined not to ignore today’s feeling for mass production, we designed a whole chapter of flowers that can be cut out six or eight at a time. Once round with a pair of scissors, one fold, one twist and you have a rapidly growing pile of flowers to decorate a cone, a hanging ball or a ring.’
* * *
Miranda took off her clothes and lay on the bed like a corpse. She felt like weeping, she was so lost. She let the air of the fan wash over her, thinking about Nick and the false accusations that had been made against her.
* * *
‘We can recreate the idea of a holly wreath to hang on the front door,’ read Mrs Karolides, u
nder her standard lamp, ‘without having to make a wire and moss frame for it –’
* * *
Miranda sat bolt upright. Somebody was trying the handle. Remembering da Souza’s warning about burglars, she slid off the bed, wrapping the sheet around her, and looked about the room for a weapon. All she could see, in the moonlight, were the sponges on the walls. The door rattled again. Her stomach churned.
Finally her eye fell on an empty beer bottle next to Nick’s computer. She grabbed it by the neck and went over to the door.
‘Who is it?’ she asked, fiercely.
‘Who’s that?’ said a familiar voice on the other side.
‘Nick?’
She opened the door, and took in, framed by the dim light of the corridor, a figure in a blue sweater and sea boots. She felt her heart leap, as if something very precious and wonderful, which she’d thought lost, had been restored to her.
‘Miranda!’
She threw her arms round him.
‘Thank God. Where the hell have you been?’
‘Hell’s exactly where I’ve been.’
He thudded wearily into the room in the heavy boots. He looked terrible.
‘I’ve been looking for you all over for days!’ she said, still clutching the sheet and bottle.
He sat down on the bed, drawing violent breaths. There was a large cut on the side of his head.
‘Uh, it’s a bit complicated … You can put that bottle down now. How come you’re here anyhow?’
‘Because of the bombs.’
‘What bombs?’
She gave a little laugh. ‘You really have been away, haven’t you?’
She sat down beside him, pulling the sheet more tightly around her. ‘I was beginning to think I’d never see you again.’
‘You nearly didn’t.’
‘What happened?’
He leant forward and put his head in his hands, pressing his fingers into his skull as if all the punishment in the world had devolved upon it. She realised she had to be practical, that now was not the time to tell him how much his return meant to her. He was too distraught.
‘You know, you smell pretty bad. Why don’t you go have a shower, then you can tell me what’s been going on. And me you. And I better have a look at that cut, too.’
‘OK,’ he whispered. He went through to the bathroom and started taking off his clothes.
Replacing the sheet, Miranda made the bed. She could hear the sound of the shower coming through. She put on a T-shirt and shorts and went to ask da Souza for a first-aid kit. Back by the time Nick came through, with a towel round his waist, she told him to lie down on the bed.
‘I need some clothes.’
‘Just lie down.’
She dressed the cut on his temple, which had softened in the shower and was bleeding slightly, and bandaged up the deeper wound on his swollen knee. Apart from the occasional wince he lay there in silence. She could hear the waves washing quietly outside as her hands moved over his body.
Later, as the fan whirred above them, they talked, lying face to face on the bed as they recounted to each other the story of their recent days, each equally full of astonishing facts. Later still, by which time the generator had gone off, the fan ceased its gyrations, and the moon waxed stronger, diffusing its light over the immensity of the gently whispering ocean – later still, touching, murmuring, surging, they made love.
* * *
‘Or we can imitate,’ read Mrs Karolides, ‘those blossoms of Arabia that blush unseen in the desert air, without having to cover them under hothouse panes. In the diagram below, you see how a heart of rose petals can be arranged within a triangle of leaves, conveying an impression of the paradise garden, walled off from the ordinary world.’
Thinking of her pyx, her little wooden box in which a priest had once carried the sacrament, she stood up and went to fetch it.
* * *
Nick turned to look into Miranda’s green eyes; they were wet with tears. He felt a wave of panic.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Just happy.’
‘Oh.’
‘You growled like a beast,’ she said, reassuringly, squeezing his hand.
He laughed. His pains forgotten for a while – loving her for that mercy, and for the adventure of her body – he gathered her into his arms once more.
They lay like that for some time, until he rolled on top of her and brought his face down to her breasts. After another little while he took one of her nipples into his mouth, and raising a hand to the other, let his palm brush over it. She uttered a cry … He moved down her body, covering her stomach and pelvis with subtle kisses till, like a hummingbird over a flower, he began flicking his tongue over her.
She put her hands in his hair, whispering his name.
29
Morning dawned, and with it knowledge – for Miranda at least. It was imperative Queller be told about Nick’s arrival and what had happened to him on Lyly, but both her mobile and the land-lines were inoperative. Short of flying immediately back to Dar, there didn’t seem much she could do. She decided to give it a couple of hours. They had a swim before breakfast, during which Miranda wondered whether she was just delaying her return in order to spend more time with Nick.
After they had eaten, she tried the hotel phone again, to no avail. Nick was in the TV lounge, sitting on the sofa in shorts and T-shirt. She went to join him, dialling on her mobile with her thumb as she walked across the room.
‘It’s a newsflash,’ said Nick, excitedly. ‘Clinton.’
Her eyes flicked from the little screen in her hand to the big one mounted on the wall. This time, however, even though his mea culpa was still as fresh in the wind as the Macpherson’s jasmine, the President wasn’t talking about Monica Lewinsky.
‘We have convincing evidence these groups played the key role in the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania,’ he was saying, in a statement from Massachusetts. ‘Terrorists must have no doubt that in the face of their threat, America will protect its citizens. Today, we have struck back.’
‘Christ,’ said Nick.
‘Shush,’ said Miranda.
‘That was the President speaking from his holiday retreat at Martha’s Vineyard,’ intoned the announcer. ‘In the wake of his grand-jury ordeal, he was on vacation with Hillary and Chelsea. Now he has cut short his visit there and is returning to Washington. We hope to bring you coverage from the White House shortly of a briefing he will give on the strike.’
They listened to the backgrounder, and watched the graphic displays. At Zhawar Kili al-badr, a complex of three camps associated with Osama bin Laden near Khost, in Afghanistan, twenty-one people had been killed and thirty wounded. At the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory at Khartoum in Sudan, said to be owned by the terrorist leader and staffed by Iraqi technicians supplied by Saddam Hussein, twelve people had been killed and dozens injured. Some, the screen showed, were still being dug out from beneath the rubble. But the facility thought to be there, for the manufacture of VX nerve gas, had been ‘functionally destroyed’, said National Security Director Sandy Berger.
Sudanese officials protested that the factory hadn’t been making Empta, the chemical precursor to VX. It had, they said, been making cough medicine, antibiotics and simple analgesics (aspirin and paracetamol), as well as veterinary drugs for animals. The factory also produced medicines for diabetes, ulcers, tuberculosis, rheumatism and hypertension, supplying 70 per cent of the drug needs of a country beset with war and disease.
US officials countered that they ‘could find no evidence’ of all this. What they did have was a CIA soil sample from the factory, a sample containing Empta, they said.
Sudan was also quick to point out that it had expelled bin Laden in 1996 after pressure from the US, sending a hundred of his followers with him to Afghanistan. ‘We gave US officials a piece of advice that they never followed,’ said the Sudanese foreign minister Salah-el-Din. ‘We told them: “Don’t send him out of Sudan
because you will lose control over him.” Now, the United States has ended up at war with an invisible enemy.’
The picture, which had been glowing red with rubble fires at the factory, changed suddenly. The anchorman cut in: ‘We can now bring you the President in the Oval Office.’
‘Good afternoon. Today, I ordered our armed forces to strike at terrorist-related facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan because of the immediate threat they presented to our national security.
‘I want to speak with you about the objective of this action and why it was necessary. Our target was terror. Our mission was clear …’
Miranda watched Clinton’s jaw move.
‘Their mission is murder. And their history is bloody …’
‘Oh my God, they have bombed?’ asked da Souza, coming into the room. He stood next to the sofa, the white arms of his suit stretched out in front of him like those of a supplicant.
‘Shush!’
‘Our forces targeted one of the most active terrorist bases in the world. It contained key elements of the bin Laden network’s infrastructure and has served as a training camp for literally thousands of terrorists from around the globe. We have reason to believe that a gathering of key terrorist leaders was to take place today, thus underscoring the urgency of our actions.
‘Our forces also attacked a factory in Sudan associated with the bin Laden network. The factory was involved in the production of materials for chemical weapons.
‘The United States does not take this action lightly … We will persist and we will prevail. Thank you, God bless you and may God bless our country.’
‘That was the President, who will now be resuming his vacation at Martha’s Vineyard, after making phone calls to other world leaders to garner their support for the strikes.’
Later in the day – during which Miranda and Nick had the manager bring them pizza and beer – it became clear that bin Laden had been nowhere near the camps when the missiles struck. He was, said his Taliban protectors, ‘alive and well’. According to one report, he had left the camp an hour before the strike. Some said that he hadn’t been there for months and that other terrorist groups rented the military-style complex off him. Whatever the case, bin Laden had been on the qui vive ever since the embassy bombings, according to an unnamed security source in Pakistan, and had started moving from base to base.