The Dhow House

by Jean McNeil

  Yes, she can feel its presence, the border, even in Kilindoni, and the country that lies beyond it, like a black sword poised above their heads. This is the country that serves up the thin men she operates on, far away in the Sahel, near another section of desert border. This is the country that has wiped itself off the face of the earth, a process of erasure that began not in a war or an invasion but an implosion. She has never been there but imagines it sometimes, its gutted stadia and decapitated minarets. But these are not her own images, somehow. They are being projected to her from elsewhere, so that she may filter and broadcast them to her own mind.

  She can see him, the generator of her false memories, walking towards her that day in Gariseb when she is surrounded by three of her colleagues who try to protect her. He strides with that matchstick gait the fighters she treated there have. She is beginning to sweat and has lost control of her bladder and a warm stream of pee runs down her leg. No, he says – she understands the word, la, but it is elongated, strung out in Ali’s mouth, laaaaaaaa, then many words of haste and reprobation and the grip is loosened slightly, her hands unbound, her colleagues restrained behind a chaotic cordon of men, the buzz of a pickup waiting nearby. Ali’s words ringing like dark bells in the air. No.

  Julia stirred a pitcher of passionfruit juice. Morning sun formed a halo on the patio floor. She sat on a kitchen stool. She saw her aunt studying her. The discerning note in her eye had been replaced by something a shade warmer.

  ‘I was just thinking,’ Julia said, not meeting her eye, ‘about your reaction yesterday.’ She paused. ‘To the jets.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m a bit nervous these days. I’ve had a tough four months.’

  ‘But you aren’t near any fighting in – in the north. Where was it you said you are working again?’

  ‘Gariseb. Near the border.’

  ‘I thought all the Western donor agencies had pulled out of there after the attacks on aid workers last year.’

  ‘They did, but two medical corps stayed.’

  Julia seemed to be considering something – whether to believe her, perhaps, even though everything she said was perfectly true. Julia might know that in the company of someone else – a colleague, or someone better informed – she would not have resorted to such pat explanations. The truth was that all the international NGOs who had worked in the area for twenty years – Oxfam, Save the Children, even the UN – had decreed the area unsafe for their personnel, even though it was now a demilitarised zone.

  ‘It must take guts, to be somewhere everyone else has left.’

  ‘Only certain people can do it,’ she agreed. ‘But when you’ve had as much experience in conflict zones as I have, it’s almost a relief to be on your own. And there’s no jets there,’ she said, trying a rueful smile.

  The careful note had returned to Julia’s gaze. Her aunt was wearing another beach dress, this one the sand colour of her eyes. Her feet were bare. She wore no jewelry apart from a pair of glistening diamond earrings. Julia’s pageboy haircut made her face look delicate and strong at once. Her body appeared hard, planar, but also somehow yielding, as if it had retained its memory of fleshier incarnations. Something of her mother’s cast – a very minor echo – the slope of her aunt’s cheekbones, perhaps, pressed upon her memory.

  ‘How did you come to Africa?’ she asked.

  ‘Work, initially.’

  ‘Weren’t you a model?’

  ‘Did your mother tell you that?’

  The sharp tone made her back away. ‘I don’t know where I heard it.’

  ‘I was a photographer.’

  Julia told her the story in a slightly famished monologue, as if she had been rehearsing it, as if she’d had no one to tell her story to in years.

  She started with her parents – Rebecca’s grandparents, who she remembered not very well, they had both died when she was twelve – how they were inattentive bohemians, useless at university applications, no money. About her confusion about what to do after university, a sudden passion for photography, a chance decision to try to find a destiny, a flight to a city she had never heard of before, then called Lourenço Marques.

  ‘I thought it sounded like the name of a dictator, and it was, in a way.’ Julia’s chime-like laugh hung in the morning breeze. Julia told her how she had cut her teeth in Madagascar – a long-forgotten failed revolution – then on floods in Mozambique and finally in Zaire, photographing child soldiers. It was this last assignment that had finished her off, as she put it. ‘The look in their eyes,’ Julia said. ‘I’ve only seen eyes like that on snakes.’

  She watched her aunt absorb the memory of what she had seen. It temporarily weighted her, and for a second Julia became a different person – a version of the woman she might have been, perhaps, if she had stuck with her job. Julia with a blue UN flak jacket. Julia wearing a necklace of cameras and binoculars.

  ‘Why did you stop?’

  ‘Digital came in and I couldn’t keep up. I couldn’t adapt. Everything was so fast. I used to have to persuade businessmen to take my photographs back to New York or London with them. I’d put the rolls of film in an envelope and write useless if delayed. Everyone did that then, all the AP and Reuters people, until they got satellite. I bought a digital camera in London but I never liked the process. It was too easy. I think the magic was destroyed, for me.’ Julia was silent then, heavy with something unexpressed. ‘It got too real. I saw people killed.’

  Julia’s lovely, unlined mouth tensed. ‘I decided I wasn’t built for it,’ she went on. ‘I couldn’t get what I’d seen out of my mind. Other people I worked with could. Mind you, they drank more than I did. On one of my last assignments – it was in Brazzaville – I met Bill.’

  ‘How did you meet?’

  ‘Around the pool at a hotel.’

  That moment when Julia and William encountered each other appeared to her fully realised, as if she had lived it herself. The green glasses containing weak gin tonics, the scruffy palms on the street outside, the unhealthy algal glow of the pool, and a man, Bill’s blue eyes shrouded in sunglasses, looking so much like the son he would eventually bear with the stranger in a blue-and-white-striped bikini sitting two tables away.

  The light had thickened. It fell into the kitchen in a yolky wedge. ‘Rebecca?’

  Her name, in Julia’s mouth, sounded old, settled. As if it belonged to another person.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’re tense. You know, you’re as stiff as a board. Any little noise makes you jump. We’re worried about you. Maybe it’s right that you’ve come here. You need to relax.’

  Julia’s face flared. ‘You look like you’re going somewhere.’

  She turned around to see Storm walk across the living room wearing a black T-shirt and a pair of shorts. He moved with purpose, a rangy, long-legged stride.

  ‘You look a bit groomed.’ Julia all but winked at her. ‘For Storm that means he runs a hand through his hair.’

  ‘I thought I’d make an effort for your party.’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ Julia swivelled towards her. ‘We’re having a small cocktail party. Only thirty people or so. I’d like you and Storm to circulate. Bill can’t be here, so we’re going to fly the flag.’

  ‘Isn’t he coming home today?’

  ‘Unfortunately, no.’ Julia cast a glance in Storm’s direction. ‘He’s still away on business.’

  ‘I’m happy to help,’ she said. ‘What should I wear?’

  Julia shook her head. ‘Wrong person to ask.’ She pointed to herself. ‘Old person.’

  Storm had not greeted her or even acknowledged her presence. He seemed magnetically attached to his mother.

  Storm gave his mother a smile then. His face was exploded by it, dislodged from its stasis and thrown into another dimension. ‘You’re not old,’ he said.

  She spent the afternoon reading. She had bought a novel in the capital, a famous book she knew about but had never got around to reading, the story of a
Frenchwoman who had come to the country to work with a wildlife conservation organisation. She had raised several leopard from cubs. Everyone had thought her mad, they had expected her leopards to kill her. Leopard were the most wild of cats, was the accepted wisdom, she read. They could not be tamed. The woman had been killed by her assistant, a local man. Her story had recently been made into a film.

  She looked outside the window to where a coconut palm leaned over the ledge of the land. The light was foil-like yet liquid, a green-gold colour she had not seen anywhere else.

  At six o’clock she descended the stairs to the living room to find twenty people assembled. She had time to observe them before she was seen. The older people among them were not tanned and had a strange pallor. Blue patches mottled their brows, the edges of their faces. On closer inspection she saw these patches were milky freckles; some sort of reversed melanistic adjustment to a lifetime in the tropical sun, perhaps. The edges of their faces – their hairline, the perimeter of skin around their lips, were lightly crisped, like crème caramel.

  The teak dining table was laden with food. Sweating hunks of cheese squatted on plates. Strawberries sat defeated in bowls on a bed of ice, their pores hairy and dilated.

  The housekeeper, whose name she had learned was Grace, approached her with a glass of champagne. Grace held it like a chalice, cupping the bottom of the glass in her palm.

  Julia’s voice rang out. ‘Rebecca, would you mind taking that chair upstairs? It’s getting in the way down here. I’d ask Storm, but I don’t know where he is.’ Julia pointed to a large rattan armchair. People were still arriving and her aunt shuttled back and forth to the door. She went to the chair – she had supposed she might be called upon to perform such tasks in the house. She would be with them for two months, she had to pay her way somehow.

  She put the chair at the end of the corridor, in a large alcove. On the way back, she saw Storm’s door was open. Without thinking, she walked in. She went to the dartboard on which he’d pinned photographs; more, in frames, were arranged on the table underneath.

  There were many photographs of Lucy – or rather Lucy and Evan – she had heard Julia say his name, Storm’s friend who she had met the day before, or at least it looked like him – in the light of a full moon on a beach, a party by the smudged look on their faces. Another showed Lucy in London, she supposed, swaddled in a thick knitted scarf, drinking a coffee at an outdoor café.

  On the edge of her perception she saw the light move. The torso of her cousin solidified out of the darkness.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I thought you were downstairs. Your mum asked me to move a chair. I saw the light was on.’

  This was a weak explanation, more a list of unrelated facts. She saw his face decide something. Whether it was to believe her or distrust her, she could not say.

  She cast her head in the direction of the photograph of Lucy and Evan. ‘I didn’t know they were a couple.’

  ‘Since last Christmas. I think they’ll last.’ He said this with a defensive finality, as if she’d suggested they wouldn’t.

  She gestured towards the chair, uselessly. ‘Well, that’s done. Let’s go downstairs.’

  They rejoined the group. Several men were having an energetic discussion. She hung on its fringes. The men were all of Julia’s age, she guessed, their thick wrists gripped by metal watches. They were discussing a development close to Bahari ya Manda, on the last remaining strip of beach unoccupied by a hotel. It would be secluded, they avowed, looking out as it did onto a headland. From there you could see the curve of the coast, the limitless glass-blue of the Indian Ocean. They would call it Paradise.

  ‘Do you know what it means?’

  She had inserted her comment awkwardly, in a bid to enter the conversation. Julia gave her a blank look. ‘Of course, Rebecca. It means a perfect place. Perfection.’

  ‘It’s a Persian word for walled garden.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Storm was beside her. She hadn’t heard him arrive.

  ‘I learned it in Paradise Lost. I studied it in school.’

  ‘Is that a book?’

  She returned his stare. ‘Yes.’

  The conversation moved on, to mangrove draining, environmental impact studies, contractors. Storm continued to stare at her from across the table, a flat, unreadable stare that could have been anger. He might have felt shown up by their exchange, she thought. Perhaps he didn’t care about books.

  Night congealed. It came in stages here, she had observed. Beginning at five o’clock, when the shadows thrown by the five coconut palms at the edge of the garden lengthened. The sun sank on the side of the house that faced inland, into a stand of gauzy casuarinas. The sea held the light longer than the land. By seven it was completely dark. In England, now, there would be sunlight until nine o’clock. For the first time in months home tugged at her. She missed summer evenings when you needed sunglasses at eight o’clock in the evening.

  Julia had lit lanterns and the gin bottle lamps. The house looked most compelling at dawn and dusk. It preferred in-between times, but it needed night. When dark triumphed she could almost hear the house breathe a sigh of relief.

  Her phone blinked. 4.40am. The time when the body’s circadian clock is at its lowest ebb. The time when people died in their sleep.

  She remembered where she was. The tide sounded as if it were at the steps of the house, as if it might crash into the living room. The wind pounded the louvred windows. She got up to look outside. In the trees beyond her window she saw the huddled forms of sleeping monkeys sheltering against the wind.

  She could remember the remnant of a dream. In it, Storm was staring at her, much as he had done the previous evening, but she could remember nothing more about it.

  She was still awake an hour and a half later when a greasy dawn soaked the sky. She went to her window and saw lunkheaded clouds moving fast across the sea. The ocean was a cold jade. Geckoes slalomed headfirst down the walls, freezing mid-crawl when they sensed her gaze on them. They were mucous-hued, two black beads for eyes. She inspected the rust on the mesh protecting her from the fan’s blades, the paint drooping in buttery flakes from the ceiling.

  Her eye was drawn back to the horizon. Wherever she went in the house her eye searched for the ocean, as if she were afraid it would disappear.

  The sun had risen and the sky was carved in strata: a layer of lime near the water, then rose, then tangerine, then rose again. Over the horizon was the wedge of the Arabian peninsula and its desert cities: Dubai, Sana’a, Jeddah – those names like sheer curtains trailing across a floor. The ocean was peppered with islands – Pemba, Zanzibar – which, much further away, splintered into archipelagos: the Comoros, Seychelles, the Maldives.

  She heard the familiar grind of a helicopter. A blue-and-silver bubble appeared out of the sky from inland. She watched it chop through the rough wind parallel to the beach. She jumped up from the bed, her heart thudding. But there were no children to immunise against measles, no pulmonary oedemas to drain.

  She felt a burning take hold of her. This is the only way she could describe it – a light but insistent immolation that started on the epidermis and then moved to her core, where it boiled.

  She was in the living room, suddenly, almost running down the spiral staircase, then into the garden, still expecting to encounter a door or lock somewhere. The house’s security was its tall wall, the razored glass that studded it, the askari keeping watch at night, the alarm tripwire around the perimeter of the plot of land, and finally – and most effectively – Charlie the guard dog. Luckily for her, Charlie was kept in check by the night watchman. Still she heard his stiff barks as she crossed the garden.

  She walked the length of the beach in the opal morning light. Its sands were littered with pearl-like flower petals. She picked one up. It had an oblong chamber, made of gristle the colour of milk.

  She returned to the house. Sounds were coming from the kitchen. There was s
omething about their urgency that didn’t sound like Julia, who moved quietly, almost regally.

  Suddenly a man was walking towards her and she only had time for an emergency impression to form – but he’s not so much older! – before she found herself shaking her uncle’s hand. His grip had a vigour she recognised from the military men she had treated. Bruise-coloured veins snarled his forearms. He had a flared jaw like the bottom of glass soda bottles, and Storm’s severe blue eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be here to welcome you.’

  ‘That’s fine. I was welcomed.’ She smiled.

  ‘We’ll take you sailing this weekend, how about that?’

  ‘That would be wonderful.’

  ‘You must have seen some terrible things up north. We’re all very proud of what you’re doing up there.’

  No one ever said such a thing to her, except perhaps at diplomatic receptions. ‘Thank you,’ she said. They smiled at each other.

  He was older than Julia, much older, she can remember her mother saying, her eyebrows raised, voice arched. Even then, at twelve or thirteen years old, she might have understood this was a comment about money. Her mother must have told her that Bill had been a farmer, but not of a common cow and goats variety, rather an owner and director of a vast plantation. Then, after he sold his farm to the government, a property developer, then a financier – that was the word her mother had used and her twelve-year-old self had hoarded it away. It sounded debonair, French, as if raising money might be a sublime event.

  ‘We’re so glad to meet you,’ her uncle said, ‘after all these years.’

  She found she did not know what to say.

  ‘So how have you been keeping yourself busy?’ her uncle asked.

  ‘I’ve had time to read for the first time in years. In the mornings I’ve gone running. It’s a pleasure to be able to put one foot in front of the other again.’

  ‘You can’t do that in the north? Are there mines?’

  ‘No, the mines are over the border. But there are bandits. Lions. Stray RPG fire from over the border. Plus I’d probably be kidnapped and held to ransom.’