The President’s wife suddenly blushes, and Luanda looks out of the window. She looks out of the window a long time. She wants Lady Sarah to reassure herself that she, Luanda, has not seen her blush.
~
By November Luanda is exhausted. ‘Whacked out’, she tells the College porters, laughing. ‘You guys taught me the word. I’m just whacked out. Development is tough work.’
She presents a paper to the Masters class on the insensitivity of inequality coefficients as a measure of water scarcity in African countries with low annual rainfall. It’s tiring just to outline the topic. She stays up all night to finish the thing and discovers how long the winter darkness really lasts.
At the end of the presentation, her classmates clap and her tutor smiles. He asks her to give him a copy of the paper. There are one or two aspects he’d like to reflect upon further.
‘Never thought about it enough, Luanda,’ her friend Archie says. ‘The equations don’t pick up on a basic need like water. Also, I wanted to ask, were you maybe thinking of coming along to the pub this evening? We’ve missed you lately.’
She nods yes, but doesn’t show up.
‘Fell asleep over my pot noodle,’ she tells Archie in class the next day.
She also misses the President’s All Saints party. I’m so sorry, she writes on the embossed college notepaper the porters sell her, 5p a page, her pen sinking into the thick paper like a foot into a mattress. I fell asleep in the library. I won’t let it happen again.
‘Your family called,’ George the porter on duty tells her. ‘Yes, all the way from Africa. They asked you to call them. They say they haven’t had a letter in ages.’
‘But I don’t have enough pound coins saved up right now to call Africa,’ Luanda says, laughing a little. ‘Plus the letter I’ve written is so fat it’ll take a fortune to send.’
Archie comes over to her room for a visit. He finds her sitting up against the side of her bed in a plush pink dressing gown apparently doing nothing.
‘Mind if I come in, Lu?’ he says, pushing open the door. ‘I’ve brought some brandy. Duty-free, Nairobi airport. It’ll make a nice nightcap.’
‘Hardly as though I need help with sleeping, Archie,’ Luanda says, yawning energetically. She waves at the kettle on the window sill. ‘You go ahead.’
He switches on the kettle, puts a teabag in a mug, adds brandy. He is missing something—yes, that’s it, the laugh that follows most of what she says.
He comes to sit beside her on the floor, his back against the mattress, the mug of hot tea and brandy between his feet.
‘So what’re you up to tonight, Lu?’
‘Not much. Just sitting and thinking, you know, thinking and not thinking…’
‘Penny for them, as we say?’
She lays her arm on the edge of the bed and props her head on her arm.
‘Not sure I can put it into words, Archie. It’s late and I’m sleepy. I’m incredibly sleepy.’
Archie looks round the room so like his own, the fatty Blu Tack marks on the walls, the desk and lamp and bookcase, the row of library books, the cards and photographs on the top shelf of the bookcase.
‘Lu, there’s something different, you’ve changed your photographs.’
She raises her head for a second, pillows her cheek back on her arm. Her Omega alarm-clock ticks in its propped-open case on the floor beside the bed.
‘The other day I was tidying,’ she eventually says. ‘I tidied all the invitations away and I put the little photograph back in my travel album. It was unframed. I didn’t want it to get spoiled.’
‘The one of your sister.’
‘Yes, Nana. My sister.’
Archie edges a little closer, close enough for his shoulder to touch the tips of her fingers. He swallows the last of his tea-and-brandy. Her eyes are suddenly fixed on him.
‘You could let me hold you a bit, Lu,’ he says and moves closer again. ‘As you’re so tired. We could lie on the bed and I could just hold you, if you didn’t mind. I could tell you about the summer I planted trees in the Highlands. How close the sky looked.’
He waits.
‘Lu,’ he whispers and puts his hand lightly against her cheek. ‘If you’d let me, I’d like to get to know you better. I’d like to very much.’
The free hand lying in her lap comes up quite suddenly and pushes his hand away.
He shuffles back and, when she still says nothing, gets up awkwardly. His left leg has gone to sleep.
‘Sorry, Lu, sorry, I didn’t mean… I’m really sorry. Look, you know I like to see you. You know I’m always happy to see you.’
‘Archie, please just get out.’ Her voice is back in the room. Moisture shines in the grooves beneath her lower eyelids.
‘Don’t come in like that again,’ she says as he pulls the door open. ‘My unlocked door isn’t an invitation. I leave it unlocked so I don’t feel boxed in. Sealed in a stone-cold tomb—remember the Christmas carol.’ She almost laughs.
~
Luanda now comes to classes late. She slips into the seats at the back and spends her time cross-hatching shapes in her notebook. To Archie she says hello just the same as before.
Then she’s not in class at all.
Lu must be in the library, the others say, she’s a great one for working round the clock. Archie remembers the thing she said about the Christmas carol and checks the library. She’s not there.
Perhaps she uses another library, the others say. Ask someone in her college, the porters are her friends. And Christmas is coming. Luanda is surely joining in somewhere, getting her essays in early. Didn’t she say she’d try to make it over to Europe—Switzerland, she said? Didn’t she want to see some snow?
After dinner, Archie takes a walk past her college. He checks her window. The light is on. There are shadows moving across the ceiling.
The next day he sees the books that were in her bedroom the night he visited on the book-returns trolley in the library. He takes them out himself, leafs through each one. There might be a note, something to tell him what’s up. He finds an old train ticket dated from before the summer, before Lu ever arrived in England.
On the final Monday of term, a frosty day, he writes her a Christmas card, a plain seasonal greeting, English as it comes. He puts her name at the top and Archie at the bottom. Then he scrawls, Look forward to seeing you back next term.
The line is barely legible so she can easily ignore it.
Should he have said back? he asks himself, sliding the card into the envelope. He could better have left it out.
He walks the card round to her college. The porter watches him slide it into her mailbox.
‘No telling when she’ll pick that up,’ the porter says darkly. ‘In and out of here at all hours, she is.’
Archie sees the business card tucked into the metal name bracket below the mailbox.
Kids’ Hair Workshop, the card says. Weaves, Cornrows, Braids. Face-painting While-U-Wait. Horshill Community Centre. Once a week only. Don’t miss out!
‘She’s off to Switzerland, I think? She wanted to see some snow.’
‘Like I said, there’s no telling with Lu. No telling what’s up from one minute to the next. Doing stuff with kids. Collecting toys to send to Africa. It’s all for development, she says.’
‘Yes,’ Archie says, feeling suddenly tired. ‘We’re all studying Development as hard as we can.’
Luanda’s reply to his card arrives at his college within hours, a Christmas card showing a red robin standing on a patch of blue snow. There is nothing written on either side of the gold Merry Christmas. On the facing page are two scrawled lines.
I’ve found a park outside of town. It has a duck pond, a putting range, the works. Let’s do a Christmas outing. Tomorrow 2pm.
~
They meet at the bus-stop beside the coffee shop in a dense drizzle. Luanda presents her cheek for a kiss and Archie presses his lips to her skin. She is icy cold. Silver droplets shin
e like glitter in her hair.
Their bus passes ten or more stops. Then Luanda clears a round hole in the fogged-up window and elbows him.
She leads him down a long suburban street, past a small roundabout, into a narrower street. The drizzle has faded away. They reach a green metal boom and a grassy car-park, a shuttered ice-cream hut.
‘See,’ Luanda says with satisfaction as they walk past the hut. ‘Park all around, far as your eyes can see, park, park and more park, flat as flat. Flat, straight avenue, big flat duck pond. Not a single piece of old stone in sight.’
Archie follows her along a muddy path beyond the putting green to the pond.
A squashed fruit-juice carton floats on the surface of the pond amongst the dead leaves and some crumpled sheets of paper. The paper is silver Christmas wrap. A straw is stuck in the carton like an antenna. There are no ducks to be seen. They sit down at opposite ends of the metal bench.
‘I come here quite often,’ Luanda says after a bit. ‘The first time, there was a granny with a toddler. They were feeding the ducks bread, sliced bread, I remember. Developed bread.’ She begins to laugh, then coughs. ‘There were a lot of ducks here that day, brown ducks. I looked at the ducks, the toddler and the gran. I looked and looked and then I cried, I couldn’t help it.’
‘You cried?’
‘Yes, I cried, but not that they’d notice. See, it was so beautiful, so peaceful, the pond, the ducks. I thought how much I’d like to take Nana to this park. This would be the first duck pond she’d ever seen. It’s the first duck pond I’ve ever seen. At home, we have a park in town, but it’s sandy. There’s no grass. There’s a meerkat enclosure and beside it a vendor sells samosas from an ice-cream cart. There’s a shade cover over the viewing area that the Australian embassy donated. We sometimes take Nana there. We like to watch the meerkats. People feed them samosas though they shouldn’t.’
She folds her arms tight across her chest. Her breathing is odd, as if she’s swallowing hiccups.
‘I’ve been mistaken, Archie,’ she suddenly blurts. ‘I thought I could start a life here, away from them all, on my own. I thought I could fulfil my dream, study Development where everyone said Development began. I thought I could, but…’
‘But…?’ says Archie.
‘But,’ says Luanda. ‘But.’
The light begins to fade. They walk back to the green boom, the shuttered ice-cream hut.
‘You go on ahead,’ Luanda leans against the side of hut. ‘I’ll stay here a bit longer. I’ll make my own way back.’
She holds out her hand. Her grip is fierce. She holds Archie’s hand for a long time before she steps away.
~
The college tonight is quiet. In the front quad the Christmas tree is a tall dark spire. The porters have forgotten to switch on its lights.
Luanda’s room is filled with a soft golden glow. She has turned off the overhead bulb and thrown a scarf over her desk lamp. She pulls two sheets of embossed college notepaper from her desk drawer.
Dear Archie, she writes in her beautiful cursive, I’m sorry not to say goodbye in person. I love so much about being here and even about Development (ha-ha) but I have decided to suspend my studies. I miss my family too much and I don’t want to carry on, at least for now.
To the President’s wife she writes the same message, minus the (ha-ha).
Then she continues, I miss Nana especially. I think it is too much for my mother to look after her on her own. Ma has already raised her kids and Nana is not her job to look after. She’s my job, my daughter. I wanted to let you know. As she gets older I will try to make it up to everyone. Most of all, I will try to make it up to her.
She reads through both letters and adds Happy New Year! to the end of each, then slides the sheets of notepaper into their matching embossed envelopes.
~
At the end of spring term Archie and the other Development students have coffee in Luigi’s café off the High Street. They have kept on coming since the beginning of the course. These days Luigi gives them double espressos for the price of a single.
They sit at their table in the corner under the noticeboard where customers pin up their business cards. Luigi insists that every customer leaves a card. Everyone has something to sell, he says, even you students. Maybe you do typing, maybe you do haircutting. Whatever you do, make a card, let the world know.
‘Sitting here I can’t help thinking about Lu,’ Archie says. ‘Remember Luanda? How she learned to say all the words for coffee.’ He notices how good it feels to say her name. ‘She virtually lived in here some days.’
‘Did she ever send news?’ someone asks.
‘No, she didn’t,’ Archie says.
He is looking at the noticeboard at the same moment that he speaks. It is like a conjuring trick. It is as if her name calls up something, as if the writing on the noticeboard makes him see what he might otherwise have missed. As he speaks he reads the half-familiar words on the business card. Kids’ Hair Workshop. He knows he has read that card somewhere before.
Now he notices the Polaroid photo stuck directly beneath the business card. The Polaroid colours are fresh and bright. In the photo a young woman in a cotton print dress is holding hands with a child in a smaller version of the same dress. It is unmistakeably Luanda. Luanda and the child are both wearing cross-braids. They point at each other’s cross-braids. They are both laughing. The child’s front teeth are growing in.
Weaves, Cornrows, Braids, Archie reads again. Don’t miss out!
Luigi puts down their espressos and follows the line of Archie’s stare.
‘Arrived last week,’ he says. ‘Our Luanda, she keeps in touch. How we miss her. But I’m so happy she is happy. Isn’t it good to see her laughing again at last?’
South, North
i. left from the metro stop, skip three streets, and then left again
Centre Pompidou. Tuileries. Louvre. Arc de Triomphe. Lise walks her fingers from name to sacred name on the map spread on her thigh.
At each metro stop she glances up quickly to check the station, then looks straight back down at her lap. There are people standing up in the carriage but she avoids making eye contact. The world doesn’t need to see how excited she is. She knows how she gets when she’s excited, the raw wonder gaping from her eyes like a kid’s at Christmas.
The Seine, yes, the Seine, she walks her fingers. Île-de-France, Notre Dame, she cups her hand over the heart of the map, more history and more energy crowded into this inch than a hundred inches of the map back home. It’s Paris, really Paris, here, all around, in every direction, as she comes up now from the metro, no, le métro, and sees the evening sky pouring pink over the Place de la Concorde.
Her first destination is the youth hostel off the Rue de Rivoli. She sounds out Rue de Rivoli under her breath, in the back of her throat, Frenching the Rs. Stupid to say, but it’s hard to believe that this crowd she’s moving through speaks French, all these people speak and think in French. If she opens her mouth and says Rue de Rivoli, they’ll listen and understand her, these words that she has spent the past couple of years learning to say with no one but her maths teacher to check whether she’s making sense or not.
For now, though, she doesn’t open her mouth to speak. Months ago, in her far-distant desert town in her far-distant country, she picked out this street and this street number on the map. She made a cross in light pencil on the spot and wrote herself directions in her notebook, this notebook open here in her hand.
left from the metro stop, skip three streets, and then left again.
Backpackers her age sit in the neon-lit youth-hostel common room drinking hot chocolate with rum and talking about other places they have visited—Morocco, Sicily, Istanbul, even India. They exchange tips for cadging rides in Turkey and ferry trips in the Balearics and finding cheap meals everywhere.
Someone talks about hitchhiking in the Algarve and getting picked up by a bra salesman. Three times the girl repeats th
e punchline. ‘So I asked to put my backpack in the boot, and, oh my god, it was nothing but a mass of under-wiring and padded cups!’
Lise does not join the group. She has no travel stories to share. She has visited no other places. Her shoulders are sore from carrying her backpack because it’s stuffed full of her complete library of French books, ten of them. She gets into her top bunk, puts her head on the thin hostel pillow and faces the wall. It’ll be morning in less than a minute, she tells herself.
ii. right and right again and…north
In the grey morning light Lise dresses quietly, jeans, jumper, boots. She bundles her hair into a ponytail, out of the way. No one else in the dorm is awake. The person in the bunk-bed below is snoring throatily, her face pressed into her pillow. Lise eats the polished green apple she bought yesterday at a metro kiosk. She nibbles and slides her mouth over the fruit so as not to make noise.
She squats down to prepare her daypack. How many times, back home, at the airport, over and over, has she gone through this routine? She closes her eyes and takes from her big backpack a blind sampling of four books. Each book is wrapped in a clear plastic sleeve. She opens her eyes and, fine, yes, she approves the selection—two Zolas, one in translation, L’Assommoir, that’s good, also Nana.
The books bristle with post-it notes but she won’t look at the marked pages now. When her favourite passages point to things here, now, close by, within reach, unbelievable, out here in the streets of Paris, and she is in Paris and must go find them.
She squares up the books and slides them into her daypack, wedging the pile into place with her disposable plastic rain jacket and a bottle of water she refilled last night in the hostel bathroom. She squeezes in a packet of madeleines, her first madeleines ever, also from the metro kiosk, but she won’t open them yet because the plastic wrapping is too crackly. The fold-out map of Paris she puts in her pocket, opened to the right section. Keep it nice. The map is on loan from her maths teacher. He not only knows French, he’s also the only person from home who has visited Paris. That is, till now, till this visit.
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