The Dhow House

by Jean McNeil

  Legend Press Ltd, 107-111 Fleet Street, London, EC4A 2AB

  info@legend-paperbooks.co.uk | www.legendpress.co.uk

  Contents © Jean McNeil 2016

  The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

  Print ISBN 978-1-7850794-4-3

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-7850794-5-0

  Set in Times. Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International.

  Cover design by Simon Levy www.simonlevyassociates.co.uk

  All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Jean McNeil is the author of ten books. She has twice won the Prism International competition, once for non-fiction and for short fiction. Her work has been nominated for Canada’s premier literary prize, the Governor-General’s Award, the Journey Prize, for a Canadian National Magazine Award and the Pushcart Prize. She is the co-director of the Masters in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, Norfolk and lives in London.

  Visit Jean at

  jeanmcneil.co.uk

  For Bb, rafiki yangu ele na ishi karibu na bahari

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  I

  Amani sunbird

  II

  Black-bellied bustard

  III

  Red-chested cuckoo

  IV

  Amur falcon

  V

  Nubian nightjar

  VI

  Augur buzzard

  VII

  Hartlaub’s turaco

  VIII

  African sacred ibis

  IX

  Northern carmine bee-eater

  Short glossary of Swahili terms

  Acknowledgements

  Fire on the Mountain Samples

  We are on the dhow. The teak groans with each wave. The lateen sail is taut with wind. He is at the rudder, underneath the slatted wood canopy which throws a weave of dark and light on his face. At our feet is a basket full of shaking bream.

  A flare of sun over a blood ocean. The sun rises like a proximate planet, a burning ceramic moon. We have been at sea for so long, traversing the Indian Ocean and its jade archipelagos: Vamizi, Mafia, Zanzibar, Pemba. On nameless islands we maroon ourselves, cook cockles and prawns. Whale sharks bask in our wake. It is the Matalai, the period of repose between the winter and summer monsoons.

  He stands to adjust the sail. One foot on the gunwale, one balanced on the tiller. I push him off, as easy as I would throw the stone-shaped seed of a mango overboard.

  I tell Lucy about the dream. I don’t know why. But she is a confiding person by nature – this is probably why she has been so successful in her work.

  ‘You’re afraid of yourself. Of what you might do. What you’ve done.’ Lucy’s voice is toneless, professional. She is used to talking to people about their dreams, to excavating them for meaning. Lucy is right. I am always taken aback when people much younger than me see things so much more clearly than I do. What is the point of experience?

  Lucy is a black-and-white photocopy of her brother. She is dark-haired in a country where white women are blond as a matter of principle. She is dark-eyed, too, quick and alert. She stands out here among the local whites and expats, almost without exception beautiful women in linen shirts and skinny jeans. Her haircut is gamine; her limbs have the curious pallor of white people who have lived their lives in the tropics and hide from the sun. Storm is also slender, but he has a solidity his sister lacks. They both emit a force field: the power of the protected.

  Lucy now lives in a sandstone-coloured apartment in a gated community five kilometres from her parents’ house in Hatton. She has returned to this country from London, against all advice, against history. She would be better off living in South Africa, where her father’s money buys her the right to work, or to England, with her British passport. But something has pulled her back. ‘I’m a white African,’ she says. ‘I only make sense here.’

  We meet in the café in the Usimama complex near the university, a rare democratic space in this city. I see professors – immediately identifiable because here they still carry leather satchels – young executives who work in the satellite TV studios across the street and people from the nearby American embassy, although these days they detach their ID badge before entering public places. The city is under constant threat of attack.

  Outside the sun burns through the flame trees with their blossoms of acid orange. In the suburbs are lawns of electric green tended by gardeners and sprinklers, thick with bulbuls and cuckoos; at night we hear the whoop of hyena from the Lubaga National Park which borders the hills. Elephant, giraffe and wild dog are incarcerated there, too, only seven kilometres from the red leather chair where the president of the republic sits. On a clear day he can hear the lions roar. From the café we can see the milima ya nyuma ya tembo, the Hills of the Elephant’s Back. Two hills curve high over the city’s western horizon. The wooded forest that drapes them is stocked with turacos and whydahs and is hacked at steadily by nearby slum-dwellers.

  The hills are darkening with the late equatorial afternoon. Lucy and I have taken to drinking in this café. We start with a beer and graduate to cocktails. Our meeting again – just being together – seems to require us to drink. By our second cocktail we have become expansive and nearly trusting of each other.

  ‘I’ve thought of you so often,’ I say. This is true. Not a day has passed in the last two and a half years when I have not woken up with their faces suspended in my mind. It is not Storm’s but Julia’s face, an altered twin of my mother’s, I see most often.

  ‘Did you?’ Lucy says. She sounds unconvinced.

  ‘I felt so…’ I stall. I can’t think of any adjective that would not be repulsive to her.

  ‘Most of us have no idea what our limits are,’ Lucy says. ‘Very few people are ever taken to the boundaries of themselves by their experience. They don’t know if they are good people, or bad people.’

  ‘Do you know?’

  ‘Probably not,’ she says, after a while. ‘Or not yet.’ I think

  she is telling the truth. Lucy’s instinct is for honesty. She was always an intimate person, so much more than the rest of her family. She is the kind of person who sheds light on your flaws and shortcomings. Lucy has standards. The rest of her family knew this and made her pay, I suspect.

  ‘How is – your mother?’

  ‘She’s fine. She’s living in South Africa. So many of us end up there. It feels familiar, although of course it’s a foreign country. She’s met someone. It took a while, but she’s happy now.’

  ‘Did she leave because of the violence?’

  ‘No, that calmed down only two weeks after you left.’ Lucy shook a cocktail straw into her passionfruit juice, animating its cloudy contents. ‘In any case, Julia can cope with danger.’

  I register that Lucy calls her mother by her first name, now. In the Dhow House Lucy had always been a dutiful daughter. She looked more like her father than her mother, but she and Julia are cut from the same cloth all the same.

  I don’t ask about Storm. She does not offer any information either. Because of this
wordless agreement we can see each other, pretend we are still family.

  We sit in silence for a minute, as if we are only having a friendly conversation, two cousins catching up. Tomorrow I return to the coast, and in a week’s time she flies to Johannesburg to do her postgraduate course in forensic psychology. We could easily have missed each other.

  This is last time I see Lucy, probably the last time I will see her in this life. I watch her as she walks to her black Pajero in the car park. She steps lightly on the perimeter of the shadows of potted trees planted to provide shade against the sun. She is as slim as ever. She walks as though the ground is air. When she reaches the car she hesitates. A twin version of her appears – Lucy’s reflection in the car’s window, which is tinted against the sun. I wait in the edge of shade thrown by a palm tree, I think she will turn at the last moment and wave, but she opens the door and gets in the car.

  Tomorrow I will return to the coast, where the mosque swallows arrow through the evening sky. It is the Kaskazi monsoon, summer on the coast, which I’ve never experienced. I came to this country for the first time in the winter monsoon, the Kusi, when seaweed tars the alabaster sands of Moholo beach and squally days bring cool rain. I have always liked off-seasons, their neglect and melancholy. The monsoon is both season and climate on the coast: it brings summer and winter, tourists to fleece, times of plenty, times of want. On the coast the wind is everything; time itself swings on its hinge.

  I

  AMANI SUNBIRD

  They lived at Kilindoni. There were more dramatic stretches of coast in the country where Bill’s father could have built the house, with ivory dunes, beach bars, ancient houses glowing the colour of phosphorous in the sun. There were more beautiful places from Moholo in the north to Lindi in the south, all along the coast – pwani – that stretches for six hundred kilometres in a shallow arc along the Indian Ocean.

  Her first view of it was from the plane, which had flown from the capital and took its approach to the runway along the wave-raked coast. She saw its sweep of beaches protected by a garrison of coral reefs, the jade inlets and tangled mangrove bays. She saw the two giant rivers emptying themselves into the sea, the Mithi in the north and the Sarara further south. She saw the thin forms of dhows out at sea; from the air they looked like narrow insects with their noses to the wind. All along the coast fishermen still make Homeric journeys, travelling from Moholo to the famed spice islands – Zanzibar, Pemba – in search of the fish they call filusi.

  The house was the first to be built on that stretch of the coast. Her uncle’s father built it thirty years before the first hotel, Fitzgerald’s, installed itself on a curving faction of the beach poised between two coral islets. The beach in front of the house was not the most pristine and sandy but Bill’s father chose it for its commanding position above the shore, from where it looked out to a black coral headland called Lion’s Rock. At one time there had been short-haired lions on the coast who had adapted to the heat, but by the time of the settlers they were long gone.

  Between the house and the coastal highway were fields of pineapple plantations and in a nest of hydroponic greenhouses a Greek-descended agriculturalist named Achilles grew chives for export to France. The white canopies of the greenhouses glinted in the sun, stretched between the coral road that skirted the edge of the land and the access roads of the plantation. In between the spikes of pineapples were fields of a pulsating, almost plastic green where Holstein cattle grazed. The fields were traversed by white-tailed mongoose and hedgehogs, and green mambas whose venom could kill a herd of elephant stone dead in a single bite.

  Coconut palms leaned, thin as heiresses, into the sky. Beyond the trees the ocean hissed. White houses lined its shore. In these houses floors of cool cement were kept polished and the branches lopped off trees by housekeepers and gardeners wearing green uniforms so that monkeys could not climb inside bedrooms.

  It was a place for people whose families had been in the country for generations. Foreign tourists shied away from Kilindoni because the beaches were difficult to find, quarantined by tides; in some places the beach gave way to a network of shallow, smooth cenotes of coral. On either side of Kilindoni the ocean was garlanded with sharp reefs. So it became the preserve of locals, people from the highlands who left the cool upcountry nights and rainy winters to play on the coast.

  One night Storm would tell her how forty or fifty years before – for him an epoch away, but for her a graspable previous age – the ranchers and big game hunters of the north would converge on Kilindoni at Easter, at Christmas and New Year, and celebrate the fruit of their destruction by hooking marlin and sailfish off its fertile coasts. Then, the Indian Ocean had been thick with whales – sei, killer, pilot, sperm, humpback; an abundant marine life had fed on sea grass, including finfish and five species of marine turtle. Its brackish mangroves were studded with goliath and purple herons, which stepped like dignitaries through mud, feeding on prawns and the mud crabs sold as delicacies in tourist restaurants. The Amani sunbird, the eastern nicator, Fisher’s turaco and the green barbet were plentiful then; they threaded through lianas and sedges in the hot coastal forest where it was 30 degrees by eight clock in the morning.

  She knew little of this before she arrived. She had only a few hours in the capital, sitting in a corner in Anthony’s office, underneath the severed head of a buffalo killed by the embassy’s previous owner, and which no one had managed to remove.

  But she’d looked up Kilindoni on Google Earth. And so she knew that the plantation extended inland, its rolling hills of pineapple and cultivated sisal feeding on the moisture of the ocean. A parcel of it hugged the coast, and it was here she would find their house. Across a shallow inlet, five kilometers away, was the village of Kilindoni. There, mosques and Christian churches sat side by side, their mabati roofs shimmering the heat. From the banks of the creek dhows slid out of the harbour at dawn and pied kingfishers dived into the sea.

  ‘Would you like me to stop so I can throw that away?’

  Chocolate veined down her hands and pooled on her wrists. ‘It melts quickly, doesn’t it?’ She tried to stem the flow with her tongue.

  The night before, in her hotel in Bahari ya Manda, her first night on the coast, the heat had kept her awake, along with the drill-buzz of the fan, and the mosquitoes who had staked out her bed before she had dropped the net. But also, she was charged with a sense of anticipation so fierce her heart pounded, an alloy of dread and excitement she had felt only once or twice in her life.

  Then night capsized to a tropical dawn. Birds whose calls she could not recognise sang with languid conviction. On the other side of the curtain the sun was already white-hot, at seven in the morning. The heat was a hot stone slab. In Gariseb the nights were cool. In July and August – the equatorial winter – it went down to 10 degrees at night. She would wake in her tent with her breath suspended in the air and scramble for a fleece.

  The drive would take an hour, Vincent told her. She had to close her eyes at times, when the juggernaut long-distance buses bore down on them from the opposite direction, their bulk straying into their lane and forcing Vincent to hug the rim of the road. They drove with the windows open and she heard the birds whose calls she had been learning on her computer for some months now. Some were familiar to her: the dark-capped bulbul and the common bulbul, locally abundant birds with melodious, sweet calls. They sounded as if they were arguing, a long-married couple who could finish the other’s sentences: I just said, I just meant, no you didn’t…

  She felt her body begin to succumb to a kind of melting. The heat alone seemed to want convince her of this. Everything will be easier now. You will see.

  The coastal highway shone like a black snake in the heat. They passed ragged towns of evangelical churches and motorcycle taxis, slim women barefoot, skirts made of a bright material printed patterns of pineapples or suns and moons wrapped tight around their legs.

  Black Africa – this was what Mike the army maj
or had called it. The term struck her. ‘What do you mean, “black”? Is there a White Africa?’ she’d asked him. ‘Sure,’ he’d said. Mike had been her boss and she was young then, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and so did not dispute his casting of the continent in chess piece colours. Before she came to work in Gariseb she’d not thought much about Africa at all, she realised now. She’d taken it to be a continent-country, undifferentiated, like Antarctica or Australia.

  ‘Why are they all dead?’ She turned to face Vincent, who drove with stern concentration.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Those trees. Do they always look like that?’

  The fat grey leafless forms had begun to appear north of the village of Larona, like bloated skeletons. Their girths were big enough to house a small bar. They looked less like trees than spirits.

  Vincent’s head give the slightest of shakes. She saw words moving on his lips, before they were discarded into a hesitant smile. He might have learned that to dispute what white people said brought only trouble.

  ‘They’re alive,’ he said, finally.

  ‘It’s so hot,’ she said.

  ‘This is the time we call winter.’ Vincent said. ‘In summer it is five degrees hotter. This is, how do you call it… the down season?’

  ‘The off-season.’

  The spiky plantations receded, taking many of the bloated trees with them. Now lush trees with thin cascading leaves draped themselves close to the road. Through them she could see the gnarled knots of mangroves.

  ‘We are getting closer now.’

  Vincent turned the wheel and a dust lane swallowed them. She still held her chocolate ice cream, now melted to brown sludge. It was her first ice cream in months, bought at the Manda Bay shopping mall café. In the same café, a low-lit, wood-hued place filled with white faces, she’d bought bread, a couple of good French loaves. She couldn’t think what else to bring to Julia, for the family. They might have everything.