A Life Elsewhere

by Segun Afolabi

  In the car Marcia’s eyes were still closed. He did not know if she was sleeping. He slid in quietly and sat for a moment, staring out at the shimmering road. He leaned his head against her shoulder and she moved to accommodate him. She sighed, long and heavily. ‘You are not alone,’ she said.

  MRS MINTER

  I OFTEN DREAM of Shree at night and sometimes when I wake – depending on the kind of dream I’ve had – I’m afraid that she’s passed on. Often she is staring straight at me, smiling, her peppered hair bunched loosely in yellow netting. ‘You were dreaming, dear,’ she’ll say, or sometimes she can’t locate the words. Her face looks blank. There are times when she is sound asleep and still, and I’ll nudge her until she stirs. She doesn’t mind this – she never complains and she nearly always smiles. She is happy enough to see me in the middle of the night and, as for me, it is always a relief to know she’s alive.

  Last night I dreamed we were both under water. I kept trying to swim towards her, but however hard I swam, I seemed to drift the other way. She was young in this dream, I don’t think I was, but she looked about twenty-five. That’s over half a century ago.

  Shree almost never wakes me up or seeks me out in a blind panic and, I suppose, that’s a measure of how different we are after all these years – one calm, the other a worrier. I think that is how it has always been. It is hard to remember; my memory is not so good these days – there are swathes of my past lost in the wilderness.

  Twice a week we are driven to the centre for what Shree likes to call her morning workouts, her exercises for the mind. We are more or less at the beginning of the route, but I like that; I enjoy the journey in. The staff who do the rounds – Yvonne and Bernie at present – maintain a constant banter. As we pick up other people – singles mostly, mainly women, a few couples – there is the impression of bustle and conversation. But it’s only Yvonne and Bernie filling the space with their chatter, and sometimes one or other of the passengers speaking quietly, and Mr Cooper who can be unpredictable. Sometimes you cannot get a peep out of him, but some mornings he talks non-stop. His voice is a small car screeching to a halt in a motorway pile-up. It’s good to have a little extra noise, but after five minutes of Gervase Cooper I am ready to return to the quiet. We collect him towards the end of the journey, so I only have to endure his voice for minutes at most – seven minutes on the way in, same again on the journey home – unless he joins us for lunch. Mr Cooper suffers from a condition which leaves him in a dead slump one day, bafflingly overexcited the next. There is a physical change too: his face comes alive, his eyes glisten, his body becomes more animated – and then there is this voice that could subdue an aviary.

  When she left St Lucia, Shree was twenty-two and I was already living in London. I had arrived two years earlier, but I was still unused to the pace of things – the change in seasons, the damp cold. A man who lived above me once developed a terrible hacking cough. All night he barked alone and bitterly in his room, so forcefully that I was convinced he would die. But he had no visitors the whole week. No one came to care for him in all that time. That was a revelation to me – how other people live. Zaria already seemed a distant memory, like something I had once imagined – the dry, lazy heat and the amicable noise of people. Had I dreamed it? Had it all been real? Often I craved the sight of something familiar: a market seller in a bright buba and head-tie hawking her wares in the afternoon sun. Or the smell and taste of fresh egusi soup. It is surprising what you can miss – such little things – when you are away from them for too long. Shree used to tell me she remembered the sound of birdsong in the mornings, the way the separate households stirred at dawn, familiar voices in the neighbourhood: her mother’s warbling as she washed the family’s clothes, her father’s uneven footfall – one step slow, the other quick – the result of a birth defect. Her three loquacious sisters. All that she left behind.

  When we arrive at the centre, we move off in separate directions. Mrs Walters, who is confined to a wheelchair, is taken to a wing I have never visited. Mr Cooper, depending on his mood, will either skip ahead of us or straggle behind. Sometimes Bernie will have to help him along, but that’s rare. Usually he makes it on his own.

  Shree and I meander along the corridors until we arrive at the green waiting room. Green because of the spinach-coloured carpet, I suppose, and the walls, which are pale and watery as spring onions. There is plenty of time since we always arrive about twenty minutes early.

  ‘Tea, dear?’ Shree sometimes asks at the entrance.

  ‘Tea?’ I’ll reply. ‘Well, let me see …’ And we’ll stand in front of the kiosk vacillating for a minute or two before we walk away. In all the time we’ve been visiting the centre, we have never bought anything to eat or drink as soon as we’ve arrived.

  The ground floor corridor doubles as a sort of gallery, with drawings and paintings by local school children, sometimes from even further afield. Once there was a set of black and white photographs by an American woman artist. Strays and runaways. Children, I mean. I don’t know how she discovered them, but there they were with their various expressions: scornful, bewildered, skittish, despondent. Shree liked these very much, but they disturbed me. I wanted to know why they had run away in the first place, what they were thinking at the time, where they were planning to go after the photograph had been taken. The pictures were displayed on the walls for several months and each time we travelled along the corridor and Shree smiled or gazed at one of her favourite portraits, the same question would return to haunt me: Where is this particular child now? The possibilities seemed endless and I always feared the worst. I was glad when they replaced the photographs with a contribution of finger paintings by a group of nursery-school children. I did not have to worry about those and they brightened up the corridor.

  Usually there are ten minutes or so of waiting time in the Green Room. Shree and I leaf through old magazines or glance around, perhaps make comments – there might be someone new there and we’ll talk quietly about that. Just last week there was a newcomer – a young man – who whispered into his mobile phone before he was collected. Nerves, I suppose. Sometimes we sit in silence. We are not great talkers, Shree and I, or at least I’m not. Shree used to be, but things have changed now. Sometimes it’s difficult for her.

  At precisely ten o’clock Mrs Minter’s face looms up from behind the glass panels of the double doors. She breezes through, smiling politely. It often seems as if there’s a gust of warm air spilling out from the corridor behind her, but I suspect that’s just the effect she has; her dresses billow around her and she always holds herself erect. She reminds me of something ocean-going. She is ample, Mrs Minter, and that gives her a certain presence. She has a slight moustache above her upper lip.

  Her arrival at the doors is our cue to get up. She waits patiently for us, still smiling, holding the door ajar. I always accompany Shree the fifteen feet or so to Mrs Minter. It’s habit I guess. She once said that Mrs Minter thought me chivalrous for doing so, but I don’t believe that’s the reason at all. Shree and I are not apart for much of the day, so there is always an empty feeling when I leave her for any period of time – or rather, she leaves me. When we are in bed at night, falling asleep, I’ll look across at her, or she might say something, and there is always this anxiety that I will never see her again. A last word, a final look – it isn’t much, but it brings some comfort. That is how I feel when I’m walking with Shree to Mrs Minter, handing her over, being left behind.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Akinsola,’ Mrs Minter says to me, or more often simply, ‘Morning.’ And then the double doors are swinging behind them and I am left to my own devices.

  My granddaughter Evelyn once asked me whether I got tired of waiting for her grandmother in that place. She had come to stay for a couple of days and she had driven us to the centre the morning she was due to leave. It was kind of her to offer, but I missed the routine of the bus, its occupants, Yvonne and Bernie’s running commentary. Evelyn rea
d magazines while we waited for Shree, or, rather, she flicked the pages vigorously. I felt obliged to sit with her. It made me tense, her boredom. I always find things to do: there is a television room, there are newspapers and magazines, sometimes I like to sit and think. Evelyn is of a generation where everything moves too quickly. There is no time to reflect.

  A couple of years ago Shree underwent hip-replacement surgery and even though the operation was a success, she did not seem to recover her spirits. She was listless and enervated, although walking was much easier now. What worried me most was that she spoke less. She did not seem to have the energy or the inclination to talk. She did not complain about pain or anything else. She only claimed that the operation had taken a lot out of her and that she simply needed rest. But she was resting constantly, when in fact, the time had come for her to begin to exercise her joints, to be more active. She wasn’t interested in that. After several follow-up consultations at the hospital during which the doctors repeatedly confirmed what an improvement the artificial hip was, it was gradually deduced that Shree was not feeling so good in herself – that is to say she was depressed. In all the years I have known her, Shree has always been buoyant, the life-force of the family – so this new development surprised and troubled me. It seemed like something unwieldy that could not be tended to, unlike Shree’s hip, or the chicken pox all of my children endured, or the time I broke my arm. It was a mystery to me. Our doctor suggested she talk to someone – to a professional – but she wasn’t having any of that, and I agreed. I tried to talk her out of her low mood. I even lost my temper on two occasions when, to me, she did not seem to be trying hard enough to help herself. She cried both times and I felt ashamed. Our children visited more often, with their own children. We went out more. But nothing seemed to work. The situation began to feel hopeless. In the end we went back to our doctor who repeated his original suggestion. That is how we have ended up travelling to the centre, listening to Yvonne and Bernie, wondering whether Mr Cooper will be shrieking or stunned into a stupor, looking out for new patients on the bus. Shree talks to Mrs Minter twice a week and I know she enjoys everything about the day: the journey in, the moments before the session, her fifty-minute therapy, lunch in the canteen afterwards. When Evelyn drove us that one time, she insisted we drive back immediately after the session, rather than wait for lunch. ‘I’ll make you a lovely meal myself,’ she suggested. ‘Or we can go to a restaurant. Much better than canteen food.’

  It was kind of her, but secretly we missed the extra time in the centre, the familiar faces at lunch, the bus journey back. It’s a routine we have got used to. Mr Cooper sometimes eats with us, especially if he’s in an agreeable mood. Otherwise he sits by himself in a corner, waiting quietly for the bus to take us back to our homes. Or we might eat with Mrs MacDiarmid who visits the centre once a week with her daughter Philippa and sometimes Philippa’s two boys, but that’s rare. I see them, those boys, like Evelyn, scratching a nose or an eyebrow, eyes roaming the room, fingertips tapping the table top incessantly. Can I blame them? Was I the same at their age? If I had stayed behind to take care of my mother, my grandfather, would boredom have been my fate?

  I didn’t stay. I left home when I was a young man. I was impatient for life to begin and the navy afforded me that possibility. There were places I travelled to I could not record in letters, sights so wonderful it was heartbreaking to be unable to share them with family and friends. But the more I saw, the more I thirsted, fearing I would spill memories along the way. I began to dread the return home, that small and inconsequential place. Home became, in my mind, a kind of prison; once it got hold of me again it would never release me. When I arrived in Liverpool for the third visit, England began to seem like a place that could become another home to me.

  I was a much braver man then than I have ever been in my life – my spirit of adventure was strong. It led me to places and situations that, even shortly afterwards, I would have been wary of. Perhaps I was foolish in my youth? Everything seemed driven by impulse. But when I met Shree in London, she made me calmer in myself and my priorities began to change. When she was pregnant with our first child, Comfort, I held down three jobs so that we could cope. I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing that before I met her. And those early jobs – school caretaker, security guard, cleaner – did not seem so loathsome to me then. I was happy enough to do them for Shree and the baby – for all of us – and Ronke and Nicholas who came after that.

  Sometimes when I’m waiting for Shree, I’ll wander back to the canteen for lemon tea, the only hot drink my stomach agrees with. It means walking through the gallery again; usually I don’t give the pictures a second glance. But when that American photographer exhibited all those months ago, I would always return to the corridor to study the photographs. I could not manage them all during one of Shree’s sessions – I cannot stand for too long at any one time. But whenever I looked at a photograph, something new would present itself to me: a battered car in the background or a bird or the shape of the clouds, some detail. A child would hold a hint of a smirk whereas the time before he or she had simply looked vacant to me. I would never spend more than a few minutes in front of each portrait, except for the one that Shree liked the most – a photograph of a boy who looked too small for his years, as if his body had followed a more languid schedule. It was entitled Kentucky-8. His skin was so dark it swallowed his eyes, which seemed sallow and squeezed from squinting. He looked Malinke, but his bearing betrayed his American upbringing – a little unfocused and wary, yet he held himself intrepidly. Despite that the boy grinned out of the frame at Shree and me for months as we walked to the waiting room and back. This was her favourite photograph and the one I liked the least. We did not talk about it, but I guessed what drew her to it. Sometimes I would stand in front of him and think of all his possibilities: would he run further away from home, would there be danger ahead, unscrupulous people who might harm him or turn his head? Or would he become discouraged as each minute of his new-found freedom elapsed and long for the family he had left behind? I hoped it was the latter. I tried not to consider the family at all, what he would return to, what had made him flee in the first place.

  It annoyed me when Shree lingered in front of this photograph. I would want to walk straight past it, but she would always stop and gaze, perhaps spend a few minutes looking at some of the others. It’s strange, but Shree did not seem to mind when the photographs were replaced. She said, ‘Oh, those lovely photos have gone, dear. But look, these ones are nice too,’ referring to the finger paintings. Perhaps they reminded her of the days when she was a school teacher. She could always find some detail to praise in something a child assumed he had struggled with unsuccessfully.

  We had a boy, but he died when he was barely a man. There were pressures in his life, this life, and he did not come to us for help. He left us, much as I had left my own family, although he did not leave behind a country or even a city. He was right here in London, but he was lost to us and we could not reach him. We could not find him. He seemed determined not to be located and when he returned to us, he was no longer living. They said he fell in with some rough types and one day he got into a fight with a so-called friend. This was along a fairly quiet street, but there were people there – it was the middle of the afternoon. When Nicholas fell, and he was dying when he fell, he was not alone – there were people who could have helped him. But in the end, no one was prosecuted. There were vague rumours among his acquaintances but they were a wild bunch. No good could have emerged from them. Perhaps I shouldn’t say that? After all, Nicholas was one of their number. They were all boys once who ran and smiled, who may have giggled deliriously when they were tickled. But everything about it hurts me. There is not one single aspect of the situation that provides consolation: Nicholas’s disappearance, the people he associated with, the manner of his death, the failure of anyone to come forward as a witness. There were men and women and children who saw. Who understands these things?


  Nicholas was the baby and our only son, and I think for Shree his death was so much harder to bear. They used to talk freely with one another, but it was always difficult for me to know him, to be easy with him. I don’t know why this should have been, except to say that my own father was a stranger to me from beginning to end.

  When Shree returns from Mrs Minter her face is impenetrable; I’ll have no idea what she has been talking about. Sometimes she will tell me a little of what they have been discussing. Sometimes I will ask whether everything is all right and she might say something about it. But I don’t ask outright – it is not my place to pry and I don’t feel she’s keeping secrets from me.

  A few months ago, after one of her sessions, Shree seemed upset; she would not look me in the eye and she answered in monosyllables. At lunch she shifted her food about the plate. When we arrived back home, she kept getting up to tidy this or to wash that, so that there was a sense of constant motion which began to unsettle me. I slipped into the bedroom to take a nap and escape her irritability. No sooner had I lay down and closed my eyes, than she appeared – dust cloth in one hand, furniture polish in the other – spraying and wiping the chest of drawers, the bedside tables, brushing imaginary dust from the lamp shades.

  ‘Oh, did I disturb you, dear?’ she asked when I forced open my eyes and groaned (I had been wide awake). ‘You go back to sleep, dear. I’ve finished in here.’ And with that she left the room.

  At dinner she seemed to have calmed down. She was eating and was less restless than earlier in the day. But still quiet.

  ‘Jide?’ She broke the silence. I knew something was coming, but I could not guess what. I could hear the faint clamour of an ambulance siren from one of the neighbouring streets. I wondered whether it would draw closer. Sometimes I think, we both do, that it has come for someone we know.