“Yes, in a minute.”
There are things I should have said to her then, but I didn’t say any of them. I thought I’d tell her when she came out. She didn’t come out. She was still in there when I fell asleep. I woke up at some point before dawn and she was there in bed beside me, nestled up against me. She’d taken my arm and put it around her. And I was grateful. Pathetically grateful. Next time the matter came up, I would say the things I knew I should say.
Very early the next morning we walked down to Cloud Cove and walked out across the sand to the island; it was accessible on foot when the tide was out, and I wanted to show Daphne the lighthouse. I own it—I mean, I inherited it, and just like my father, who inherited it from his father, I don’t know what the hell to do with it so I just make sure it gets a good spring cleaning from top to bottom three times a year and keep some books there. My great-grandfather won the place in a game of cards. I always think I might go over there to work, but I never do.
Daphne and I didn’t talk much on the way over. We picked up bits of driftwood, shells, and pebbles, and arranged them on the ground when we felt we’d carried them too far away from where we’d picked them up. The wind nipped us through our clothes.
“Oh, God,” Daphne said, as the lighthouse came into view. She said “Oh, God” again and again with every step we took towards it. “It looks evil.”
It wasn’t evil. It was just a white tower with long slits for windows. Not even a particularly tall tower. She liked it better when we were inside and she saw that it was spickand-span and modern. I took her up to the lantern room, and she stared at the lantern through the glass panels. It was the size of a man, and covered in dust. I pointed out the lenses that surrounded it, and explained how they refracted the light from the lantern and made it fly out in all directions the way she’d seen it in movies. When I took her to the watch room she insisted on turning the handles that rotated the lamp lenses. We heard the lenses whirring—not a comfortable sound to have above you—like huge wings flapping in place, but there was no kerosene in the lamp, and even if there had been, it was morning, so the whole thing was a pretty pointless exercise.
“You must have loved this place as a boy,” she said, as we came down the spiral staircase. “It must have been like a four-storey playground.” She’d brought some logbooks down with her, clutched against her chest, even though I’d warned her that all she’d find written there were times and dates and comings and goings and observations on what direction the wind was coming from.
“Not really,” I told her. “I didn’t see the point of it.”
“All right, well—normal kids would love it. . . .”
She’d brought a flask full of coffee and some rolls, and we had those at the kitchen table. She looked over the logbooks, lost interest after about four pages, as I had predicted, but soldiered on. I left her at the table and went to go and pack up a few books I wanted. I dragged a couple of crates over to the back door, so I could look out at the sea while I searched—the tide was high and choppy, but not so that I couldn’t see across the cove. I looked from my books to the water, from my books to the water—sunlight flashed once, twice, three times on the waves. The fourth time I saw that it wasn’t light. It was a hand, raised up at the end of an arm, and it was waving at me. Gradually, Mary Foxe walked out of the sea and paced across the sand towards me. She wasn’t smiling. Her hands were behind her back. She looked as if she had a lot on her mind. Once she was standing directly before me, she dropped a curtsey.
“Mary.”
“Yes, Mr. Fox?”
“I think I know what we’re trying to do with this game of ours.”
“Tell me.”
“We’ve been trying to fall in love—”
She raised her eyebrows. “With each other?” she asked, coolly.
“Would you let me finish?”
“With pleasure.”
“We’ve been trying to fall in love—yes, with each other—but we’ve been trying to take some of the danger out of it. So no one ends up maimed, or dead. We’re trying for something normal and nice.”
Mary folded her arms. “That is not what we’re trying to do.”
“Oh. What, then?”
“Your wife loves you. Turn to her. Properly. Stop fobbing her off and being a counterfeit companion. It would be good if, after all this, just once you wrote something where people come together instead of falling apart. Just show me you can do it and I’ll leave you alone.”
“But I don’t want you to leave me alone.”
She turned to face the sea. The wind whipped her hair around. Her hair is a miraculous color, like autumn leaves shaken down around her shoulders. She looked wild and lovely.
“Mary. If you were real I’d run away with you forever.”
I went to her; we faced each other. She said, “You’re cruel, Mr. Fox.” Her voice, her eyes. She was weary.
My heart was doing that jerking thing it did when I’d thought Daphne might leave me, but worse. Much, much worse. Almost unbearable. I was about to go off like a bomb or something. It actually hurt.
(Please don’t let me keel over on the sand at this woman’s feet.)
“I would like to have breakfast with you,” Mary Foxe said. “And I would like to have you defer a little to my tastes and habits—at present I have none, because you haven’t given me any. I’d like to go to dinner parties with you and play charades. I’d like to have friends to lend me books and tell me secrets. I would like to have nothing to do with you for hours on end and then come back and find you, come back with things I’ve thought and found out all on my own—on my own, not through you. I’d like not to disappear when you’re not thinking about me.”
She enunciated her words very slowly and carefully. As she spoke I saw that I’d proposed the impossible.
“So if you did find some way for me to be real and for me to be together with you, then I wouldn’t mind that. I wouldn’t mind at all.”
“Honey,” Daphne called out. “Shouldn’t we go before it gets dark?”
Mary wasn’t there anymore. She’d never passed out of my sight so abruptly before.
I was shaken, and Daphne mustn’t know that I was shaken. I’d told her she had nothing to worry about where Mary was concerned. I’d said it wasn’t “like that.” Had I lied? To Daphne? Or just now, to Mary? I’ll say anything to get out of a spot. I counted to ten, holding my chest like a fool, like Young Werther guarding his sorrows; then I went to Daphne. She was sitting on the front steps with a paperback. It had to be War and Peace—it was thick enough. The title was in Cyrillic, and so were all the contents.
“Is that . . . Russian?” I asked her.
She answered in words that left me stone cold. Russian, I presumed.
“Daphne!” It made her laugh, the way I was looking at her.
She winked. “Don’t worry, I’m not possessed. I said I’m just brushing up. I’ve been taking a correspondence course. You’ve got a lot to find out about me, my friend.”
She looked a little cold, so I put my jacket around her shoulders and we strolled down to wait at the post where the ferry came in. And she leaned against me, and it was all right.
HIDE, SEEK
Once, in Asyût, east of Cairo, a boy was born to a market trading family fallen on hard times, a family too poor to keep him unless he had somehow been born full-grown and ready to work. The boy’s tiny mother had given birth to five big, healthy, noisy boys before him. But the first thing this particular boy did when he was born was cough quietly, and turn a blind, bewildered glare on his brothers, who elbowed one another and watched him closely. This new boy was far too small. He had to be spanked six times before he proved his lungs to the midwife, and even then, his cry wasn’t lusty enough. He was limp and wouldn’t cling to a finger when it was placed in his palm. He refused his mother’s breast, wrinkling his nose at the knotty brown bud of her nipple with slow bafflement.
Yet his eyes said that he needed somet
hing.
The boy’s mother saw into the future. Her mind hunkered down in the midst of her tiredness and spread the dead circle of her nerves until it overlapped into her next life, her next fatigue.The boy’s mother saw that she wouldn’t be able to coax this son, to coddle him, to silently cherish him, to let him fall and find no help, to do all of the things that it would take for this boy to survive into his strength as a man.
(She looked into his eyes—they were like a famine. Seeing them sent hurt and light through her. His eyes kept asking, asking, and she knew that a person could die trying to love him.)
If it hadn’t been certain before, the decision not to keep the boy was now absolute.
“He will not be strong,” the boy’s father winced, when news of the birth was brought to him at his sand-blown stall. “He will not be of use.” He didn’t tell the other men whose threadbare robes jostled his at market because it was not a good thing to have to send a child away.
“He will not be strong,” the midwife said, averting her eyes from the child’s. She left as soon as she could, with promises that she would tell all the doctors she knew about the child, in the hope that they knew of some infertile couple.
Sunset on the outskirts of Asyût brought clarity.
Even from the narrow side streets where damp sand beads and breathes, any window can tell you why they say here the world began with a brother and sister locked in a beautiful circus trick. In Egypt, like everywhere, the land is made to fit the sky; but here it is more so. Here it is possible to say, “This is land,” and point, and “This is sky,” and point, but the eye can’t discover the dividing line. Nut cranes her neck over her long, lithe, blue back to kiss Geb, and Geb cradles her, careful, because she is nothing, less than nothing, but if he should drop her it would be the end of everything. The boy’s mother was comforted by sunset, and she closed the shutters and began preparing her new son’s cot.
The next day’s noon came like a blazing hoop, and the sun spat razor blades through it. People did what they had to to keep from wilting. Slim women waddled; fat women crept close to the ground, barely taking steps. Amongst them came a tall, ramrod-straight woman in pure black; she parted the jostling knots of people in bounding spurts, like a dark thought. She was accompanied by the boy’s midwife.
The woman took the market traders’ son away with her because, she said, she needed a seeker, and this boy was one.
The woman’s voice was soft and you had to listen hard for it, otherwise you thought she was trying to speak to you with her eyes alone. The atmosphere around this woman told of books and fine rugs. The boy’s mother cried and held herself, held her leaking breasts as the woman took her son away. But she didn’t change her mind.
A girl was born in Osogbo, in a small hospital a few feet away from a stone shrine to love. The girl was a heavy baby, with features that were pleasing because they were fluid and made her simple to look at, as if she was carved all of a piece. The girl was very quick learning to walk, to speak in both English and Yoruba, to eat solids, to use her potty, to smile in a certain way that brought maturity down like an axe on her face. At six years old, she prostrated herself before her elders unasked. She clambered over her milestones with unassailable, businesslike calm. No cute lisping, no unusual habits. It took the girl’s parents a long time to realise that their daughter’s docility and sweetness was in fact vacancy, a kind of sleepiness and an instinct for ease that translated itself to her entire body. The girl’s hair grew soft and light so that combs flashed through it without tangling, so that it sat well in plaits. Blemishes fell away from the girl’s skin with simple soap and water. The same question put to this girl two times in a row would yield two different answers, depending on who asked the girl the question, and in what tone. The day that he saw that it was enough, the girl’s father was chauffeuring a sweaty, bearded oil executive to the airport. The girl’s father looked away for a moment from the well-fed face, from the firm, confident mouth of his passenger in the rearview mirror, and saw his daughter following a street vendor home, nodding and smiling in the shade of the bush-lined thoroughfare, a sack of the street vendor’s rice piled across her shoulders with a sturdy, troubling grace. The girl’s father bundled her into the car without ceremony or apology to his passenger, and at home he thrashed her with a walking cane. He held her head down on the kitchen table as he beat her, and his fingers dug into her scalp, but he did not feel her neck tensing against him, and she didn’t make a sound. He kept on hitting her because he wasn’t sure whether she was feeling this or not. The neighbours came en masse, some with their fingers entwined in the fur at the scruff of their goats’ necks, and they remonstrated with him. Women pulled off their head wraps and wrung their hands. “It is too much,” everyone told him. The girl’s father stopped when he was tired of hammering on her bones. He watched her breathing; her shoulder blades rose and fell with her head turned away from him and into the table. When she lifted her head she said unsteadily, “Sorry, Daddy.” Blood welled from the space between her lips.
The boy grew up with a hard smile and a complicated manner that was at once condescending and eager. He developed a gait that made him seem arrogant. These were attempts to counteract his eyes and their treacherous tendency to ask. He wasn’t handsome, or talkative, but his adoptive mother made sure that he dressed well, in English tailoring and American denim. And his sadness was luminous. Girls his age gave him kisses and held his hand even when they shied away from other boys. Women offered him honeyed pastries, confidences, concern. He walked the markets and puffed pipe smoke in corner teahouses, breathed in the spice-pod musk of men and took their advice with throwaway thanks.
The woman who had adopted him was a widow, and it was possible that her bereavement had made her mad. The boy’s new home terrified him, because the downstairs was bright and softly pastel-coloured and air-conditioned, but the upstairs was cordoned off. If he looked hard enough, he could make out doors and bare floors, but that was all. At night he slept on a couch beside the woman who had adopted him. The woman herself slept on a boat-shaped chaise longue; it took to her body in a way that he would never see again, let her sleep with grace although her arms and legs were bunched up and her feet were hanging off the end of the couch. It didn’t seem to matter very much that the woman didn’t grow older as he grew older, either, though he suspected that something about the woman herself slowed him down, bathed his thoughts in perfume, set his dreams afloat so that his mind was abuzz with stranger things than her age, or her solitude, or the silent upstairs.
The woman insisted on being called mother.
(Which the boy called her, but with a secret hiss that came from a place inside him that he did not understand—inside his head, her name became motherhhhhhhh, smothered myrrh.)
She was an art collector, but she only collected art that was body pieces, one considered piece at a time, painstaking finds because she was looking for a collection that, when put together in a room, would create the suggestion of a woman, a woman who crammed the room from wall to wall. The boy took telephone calls and messages left for his new mother by her contacts all over the world. He travelled Egypt with her and observed cemetery graffiti as she did, so closely that she almost inhaled it—in hundreds of perfumeries they watched glass blowers torture air between their hands, force it to become solid.
Always, as they travelled, she pointed and asked him, “Do you like that? What do you see there?”
He told her the truth, and she always listened to him. She said that he chose well.
But when they got home, the boy did not ever feel anything in the presence of these well-turned ankles and smooth calves, these arms and shoulders captured in shade and the moment of motion. They were a collection, not a woman.
Then the boy and his mother got a face for their collection. The face was a photograph. The photograph was of a girl who had died with her family one night when her neighbours smashed the door down and took an axe to all those living insi
de that house. The neighbours did this because a radio broadcast told them to. The radio broadcast advised them not to wait for the evil that lived next door to grow and get the better of them. And so it was done. But after killing the family, the neighbours had not touched anything else in the girl’s house, which is how the boy and his new mother, picking over this room at the end of a series of devastated rooms, found the girl’s picture. At first the boy thought that it would be wrong to take the picture. But it was a picture unlike any other. It had been taken in the backyard of the house, at some point between the sun’s disappearance and the illumination of the moon. The girl’s smile did not seem to correspond to the presence of the camera, or even to a joke told off-camera. Her smile was unnerving because it had no reason. They took the picture home, even though the boy’s new mother complained that it wasn’t art. Then the boy’s new mother asked him what he thought of their almost complete collection, waved her arms at all the fineness and said, “You want someone. Is she here?”
He said, “No.”
“We need a heart,” the boy’s new mother said, and when she looked at him, in that moment, she seemed to him so high. It seemed that her feet connected to the ground only tenuously and it was her shadow that bore her up. The boy thought in that moment that this woman must be beautiful—no, of course she was: fine eyes, wide-curved lips, and cheekbones like slanted hooks. But at the same time he thought that his new mother must be a spider.
What nobody knew about the docile girl from Osogbo was that her heart was too heavy, and that almost from birth she had felt its weight, a gravitational pull that invited her to her grave. Her heart was heavy because it was open, and so things filled it, and so things rushed out of it, but still the heart kept beating, tough and frighteningly powerful and meaning to shrug off the rest of her and continue on its own. People soon learnt that they could play on her sympathy, and, because she was terrified that one day this unasked-for conscience of hers might kill her, she gave away whatever money she earned, gave away bread and went without. The girl tried, several times, to give her love away, but her love would not stay with the person she gave it to and snuck back to her heart without a sound. What people didn’t know about this girl was that the ancestral dead kept her company—they came to find her at bathtime and sat four at a time in the bathwater with her, cooing wistfully and using their wasted, insubstantial hands to wash her hair. The girl urged them to take care of their own children, but they refused. Her head lolled at these times, and she was overcome with gratitude. At bedtime the dead took her with them, and in her dreams, she visited their graves.
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