The Dhow House

by Jean McNeil

  Now they were driving under dark-leaved drooping trees. She knew the house overlooked the ocean; she could smell salt and kelp. A feeling seized her then, an odd belated sense of remorse. She could tell Vincent to turn around right now. He would do her bidding, just as he had for hundreds of erratic tourists, people from distant, wealthy countries who could not make up their minds and who were never happy.

  The first thing she saw of the house was a white wall, perhaps two metres high. Above its ramparts were the dark heads of palms. As they approached the white of the wall seemed to gleam brighter, as if lit from inside by some kind of fluorescence. In the centre of the wall was a dark-wooded gate with grilles of inset ironwork, so glossy and black it looked as if it were made of wet ink. Bougainvillea draped over the walls in pink cascades. On the ground their smashed and wilted petals pooled.

  She cast a look at Vincent. His mouth was working silently again, practicing and discarding words. She’d been about to say – what? – some obscure apology for the opulence they were about to enter. This is not me. I am not one of these people.

  Then they were through the wall’s aperture and the ironwork portal was on either side and they were gliding along a long dark driveway, pursued by a dog. She locked eyes with the dog, which loped soundlessly beside them. He was brown-black, a bullish, thick Doberman. She was glad they were in the car. The dog’s eyes were seeds.

  The back door of the house was slightly ajar. In it stood a woman dressed in a purple sheath of semi-transparent material. This was an aged version of the woman she’d seen in a very few photographs, with her sand-blonde hair and trim body.

  She got out of the car. She had every intention of walking up to her aunt and putting her arms around her but at the last moment she saw that this was not what her aunt expected. She held herself very upright and thrust her hand out in front of her.

  ‘How fantastic you’ve come,’ her aunt said, taking her hand. Her grip was firm. She did not try to embrace her.

  A stab in her stomach. It was raw and unexpected. She put her hand to her abdomen.

  ‘Come inside.’

  She followed the purple of her aunt’s dress into the house only to stop in the middle of a very large, high-ceilinged room. Something was missing. Then she understood: the house had no wall. The living room dissolved into a garden; there, palm trees shaded a lawn. Beyond it was a square of tourmaline water, and beyond the pool was the ocean. Along its shore was a fringe of grey ridged rock. She went forward, drawn by the sight of the waves breaking. She found herself standing in front of a swimming pool whose edge dispersed into the horizon.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Her aunt’s looked out to sea. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That grey rock.’

  ‘Coral.’

  ‘Is it dead?’

  ‘No, it’s alive. It’s low tide now. At low tide the coral is exposed.’

  The sky was covered in a thin layer of cloud. The ocean stared back at her.

  ‘Nice view, isn’t it? We never tire of it.’ Her aunt’s heels – she hadn’t noticed she was wearing shoes, somehow shoes seemed useless in this open cathedral – slapped against her feet. Her aunt was wearing those shoes with no back; what were they called? She had forgotten her entire shoe vocabulary. She had worn one pair of trainers and one pair of flip-flops for the last four months.

  Through her aunt’s purple kaftan she could see her swimsuit, a bikini balanced on coat hanger hips, and aquiline thighs. Julia might be fifty-five, even sixty. There was not an ounce of fat or wrinkle. Looking at her aunt ignited an unfamiliar trill inside her, a tinny vibration.

  ‘Are you alone here?’

  Her question sounded wrong, but it was too late to recall it.

  ‘Bill is in town, on business. The boys are out fishing. Or sailing. You’ll meet them all tonight.’

  ‘The boys?’ She was sure Julia had a son and a daughter.

  ‘Storm and his friend.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Thank you so much for having me.’

  The look that passed across her aunt’s face then, and which was almost instantly banished, was one of annoyance. It was replaced by a bright smile. ‘Nonsense. You’re family.’

  For the last few days she had been trying to remember Julia. In the end she failed to conjure up a single image. Her mother’s sister had come to England every two years, ‘to shop,’ her mother had said, with a brittle laugh. She must have been twelve, thirteen, and this fragment had lodged itself in her mind, even then. Distant relatives, she remembered her mother saying, the hurt sing-song in her voice, we were never a close family. These phrases – distant relatives, close family – had rung in her mind for weeks afterward. She did not know enough about family to ask her mother how a sister could ever be a distant relative, no matter how far away she lived.

  A thin woman wearing a flowered dress and a pale scarf around her head appeared and she was shown to a room upstairs. Everything in the house was the colour of sand, or variations on it: ivory walls, a bleached white mosquito net, skirting boards painted the palest of peach. She saw wooden sculptures, gnarled pieces of driftwood tucked in cool corners. On the walls hung baleful African masks. Some sort of lantern made from Bombay Sapphire gin bottles were placed at intervals around the house where they threw a swimming pool light.

  When the woman – she hadn’t caught her name, but she was almost certainly Julia’s housekeeper – had left, she sat on the bed. The river of thought flowed again, as if it had never been dammed.

  Why had she thrown herself on these people’s hospitality? She’d seen the bar as her aunt led her out onto the house’s stage in front of the ocean. Three types of whisky, four brands of gin. Gariseb was dry. She had gone four months without even a beer. The night before in Bahari ya Manda she’d been too tired to down the Duma beer the barman gave her, inexplicably, as a gift. She drank three mouthfuls and went to bed, even though sleep eluded her.

  Kitten heels. Yes, that’s what they were. She’d never liked them, they were dainty and threatening at once. Only a certain kind of woman would wear such shoes, a woman under the impression that she would not have to run for her life, that she would not have to walk home for thirty kilometres along the side of the highway after her car had been commandeered by rebels.

  The sea roared. It was closer, now. The tide had come in. She’d imagined the Indian Ocean would be calm, a minor ocean, pacified by warmth. But sharks patrolled the waters here – bull sharks, black-tipped reef sharks, even great whites had been known to stray north from their usual feeding grounds in the cool Mozambique channel. This was another thing she learned from Google, in Anthony’s office, after she received Julia’s invitation.

  She went to the window. The tide had come in, fast. The breakers had disappeared and the sea undulated now its surface unbroken by coral. Waves pounded the low cliff on which the house was perched.

  She sat on the bed. On the desk by her window were two photos. They sat in frames made out of dark wood. Their original colour was faded by the sun.

  She picked one up. A boy stared at the camera as if it were an adversary, his face static, a fish dangling from a hook in his hand. Behind him was a beach. Hair spiralled from underneath a baseball cap. A girl’s photo showed her seated at a long table of other young people against a stone wall – a castle or stately home. England, for certain. She knew Julia’s daughter had studied there so this must be Lucy. With her dark hair and dark eyes, Lucy looked like a different species from the boy in the other photo, who must be her brother, Storm. She studied their features and could find little, apart from Julia’s patrician nose, in common. Lucy would be coming home soon, Julia had said in her email, in the middle of August. They would meet each other then.

  The middle of August. What would she do in this house for a week, let alone two months? She would have to make an excuse, to leave early. She would find some way of staying in the capital until she returned to Gariseb. By then enough time would have passed.


  She sat back on the bed. Her duffel bag stared at her. It contained two pairs of shorts, three shirts and one dress. In the bottom of the bag, underneath these meagre possessions, was the object Anthony had procured a permit for with only a day’s notice. If you were important enough, and paid enough money, you could do that.

  She lay her hands on its outline, swaddled in a red-and-purple checked blanket. They had waved her through at the airport with Anthony’s underling as her escort. She had placed the bag in the scanner, seen its outline on the screen, halfway between a triton shell and an impala horn, those trophies tourists were always trying to smuggle out of the country.

  She shoved the bag underneath the bed and lay down. The bed’s crisp ironed sheets were turned down at the corners, as in a hotel. The mosquito net gripped its perimeter. Mosquito nets always made her think of wedding dresses, of bridal chambers, they reminded her she wasn’t married, and within that thought was the possibility, stretching into the future, that she might never be married. That there were women who men had always wanted, would always want, and this was established while they were still girls, or even earlier, when they were still mere amoebas in the womb. Her aunt was one of these women, she knew it immediately with her bleached blond streaks in her hair, her rigid stomach, the khaki eyeliner she wore to complement her taupe lion’s eyes.

  She did not remember falling asleep. The sound of the waves drew her away from herself, lured her into another realm.

  She and Ali are reading Macbeth, his copy, half-destroyed, a gift from the British Consulate in Gao when he had been a teacher, is in her hand. Beside them a hurricane lamp hisses. He is gaunt, more so than in life. She wants to ask him why he has lost weight, what has happened to him, when a pistol is pressed against her temple.

  She gasped, tugged awake by a sound, a slim bell ringing in the distance.

  ‘Rebecca.’ Her aunt’s voice reached her over the sound of the waves, how much later she didn’t know, waking her from the hasty dream. ‘Come and have a drink.’

  Even before she walked down the stairs she knew the house had changed. She paused at the top step where she would be unobserved. Here she could see the sweep of sofas below, their crisp eggshell embroidery ranged around the ocean view. She’d slept later than she thought; two of the Bombay sapphire lamps were lit. Dusk lapped at the edges of the light.

  She heard voices – urgent, loud, male voices. Her aunt’s flute-like voice. A drawer or door being opened, the scrape of a knife. A figure crossed the living room. The figure was tall and wore blue shorts. She heard the slap of bare feet walking quickly across tiles.

  She meant to put her foot on the top step of the staircase but a reticence held her back.

  Slap, slap, the feet came back. She glimpsed them, although not the body they were attached to. They left glistening narrow footprints on the floor.

  The pool gurgled into silence as the pump was turned off for the day. Then a crash of laughter. The sound rushed towards her. Some note in it frightened her.

  ‘There you are,’ Julia called from the kitchen. ‘Come and say hello.’

  Two shirtless torsos, backs to her, stood on the other side of the breakfast island. Their faces swivelled around, then lunged towards her and shook her hand. One was the boy – a man, now – from the photograph who looked like her aunt, so much so he might be a copy. He was six foot one or two, long-limbed; there were parts of him yet to be soldered together. He had light brown hair with a metallic glint, a vein of colour like brushed chrome. His eyes were the depthless blue of swimming pools. He had a strong face, not a young man’s face. There was an Easter Island stasis about it, as if he had spent his formative years looking out to sea.

  As she took her cousin’s hand, she felt briefly unsteady. The sea roared so suddenly she started. She heard water birds screech. Then a strange dead moment of silence.

  ‘When did you get here?’ he asked.

  ‘Today. Well, not long ago. I fell asleep.’

  ‘Awesome,’ said the other, immediately friendly, face. ‘Great to meet you.’

  How old would they be? Her mother had never spoken about Julia’s children. Julia called them boys only as a term of affection. She used her medical student yardstick. Her cousin was not quite as old as a newly qualified doctor, straight out of med school, who were twenty-five or six, an engaging age. They were intelligent, chatty, charming. They still had the newly minted quality of the young.

  She heard herself say, ‘It’s great to be here. It’s so much hotter than up north.’

  She had not worn shorts or bared her arms at night for four months now, and for a very long time in England either. She felt almost giddy. She could not convince her body to forget the notion that she would not need a pullover or jacket soon. She was used to that moment in Gariseb when the sun was deflected by the horizon, followed by an automatic cooling, as if the day had been a charade.

  The young men reassumed the rhythm she’d interrupted. She continued her conversation with her aunt, but her eyes tracked their movements behind her aunt’s shoulder.

  Her cousin moved in a series of explosions. He opened the fridge door, took something out – she missed what it was – plunked it on the counter, went towards the pool, grabbed his phone off the table. His friend – he’d said his name but she had instantly forgotten it – stood stock-still and kept her under a steady gaze that was a combination of warmth and wariness. He looked younger than her cousin. He was an ephebe – a word she had learned in her classics elective in her first year of medical school, and which she had instantly loved. Only his face, held tense and self-protective with a certain masculine pride, gave away his age.

  ‘Bill will be home in an hour,’ Julia said. ‘Do you want a drink?’

  ‘What have you got?’

  Her aunt shrugged. ‘Everything.’

  She perched herself on a stool as her cousin and his friend flitted away. She looked around to find them gone. ‘Where did they go?’

  ‘Who knows? They come and go like the wind.’

  A flare of noise tore the sky open. She sprang off her stool and ducked her head.

  When the noise had swallowed itself she emerged from her crouch to find Julia peering at her. ‘They fly low on the way back. I’m sorry, I should have warned you.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Army, returning from over the border. They go and come back every day. In England it would be illegal to fly that low, but here the army do what they like.’ Julia paused. ‘I thought you’d be used to this kind of thing.’

  ‘I am. I was. I haven’t been around fighter jets in a while.’

  Julia’s slim silver mobile phone emitted a discreet chime. She took it and walked into the living room, towards the garden. Julia returned, the phone clutched by her thigh. ‘Bill’s stuck in town on business. We can all have our own suppers.’

  ‘I really don’t feel like eating. I think I’ll just go to bed.’

  She retreated to her room. There, she sat on the edge of her bed, her head heavy from the afternoon, from encounters with strangers who were so familiar, and yet so removed.

  Julia had certainly met her. Her mother had shown her a photo of her three-year-old self, snug in Julia’s lap, taken on one of her aunt’s trips to England, lemon sunshine behind them, which had struggled through the bay window of their north-facing flat in the spring. In the photograph, Julia had worn a beaded necklace and a white shirt open to display a shield-like breastbone. She would have been in Africa for no more than five years at that point and already looked like a different species.

  She had certainly never met Storm. But he seemed so familiar. As she’d taken his hand she’d felt an odd buzzing in the pit of her stomach.

  From down the hall came the same explosive laughter she’d heard in the kitchen. The sea had receded. She could hear its distant rasp, and within it, an echo of the jet that had exploded into the house at dusk. She had caught a shadow of the plane in the corner of her eye as
it tore through the sky. Julia was right, it had flown much lower than would be allowed in Europe, as low as in the theatre of war. They must have been taking the scenic route home, getting a thrill from strafing the waves.

  The plane would have taken ten minutes to fly from the border one hundred and thirty kilometres away. She has never been there, but she knows the terrain from satellite images, how the coastal road winds north from Moholo, dipping inland at two wide river deltas spanned by concrete bridges. North of the Mithi river the landscape changes abruptly, becoming dry and treeless before reverting to the mangrove-choked lagoons of the coast. The road arrives at the town of Puku, a tourist gem of whitewashed mansions, their cool courtyards arranged around tinkling fountains and lined with captive Fischer’s lovebirds huddling in cages.

  North of Puku the road continues, but no one maintains it. Only one kilometre outside of town potholes begin to appear. Soon after the road becomes impassible to anything but a four wheel drive or a tank.

  Puku itself is a place of women – the men are at war. Women wear buibuis, their faces visible behind a delicate grille. The men who have stayed are either too young or too old, men with slim faces, their almond eyes supported by two strict sails of cheekbones. These men wear full-length kanzus and move like cats – spring and recoil, spring and recoil. Some have cicatrised faces, swirling patterns carved into their cheeks.

  The border is thirty kilometres beyond Puku. In those thirty kilometres stand five army roadblocks. You begin to see herds of camels grazing on the dunes, Ali had said, plucking what little they can from the saltbush, the spiky sea grass. The sea comes in blue shards, fronted by foaming yellow dunes. Women’s dress changes there, becomes more raucous, they wear abayas of fuchsia and orange. The faces of the women harden with their eyes ringed in thick kohl, their parched lips.