The Dhow House

by Jean McNeil

  Her uncle’s gaze stayed on her. He might have been expecting her to laugh, to say it was all a joke.

  ‘Hey Dad. When did you get home?’ A sleepy voice, the yawn still in it, reached them from the stairs.

  Storm walked towards them. Again she had the impression he only had eyes for his father. Sleep clung to him. His eyes were huge and glistening. He looked very young, like a child.

  ‘I was just telling Rebecca we’ll take her sailing.’

  Storm drifted to the refrigerator. On the way he stopped to give his father a kiss on the cheek. She had to look away. How long had it been it since she had seen a young man kiss his father? In England, never. The young injured men she treated at Gariseb would cover their eyes with their hands when they spoke of their fathers, who had stayed at home to tend their goats or who had been killed in rebel assaults. Tears would emerge from between their fingers.

  ‘How did your meetings go, Dad?’

  ‘Fine, but I had to drive all night to get home.’

  ‘You should have waited, or flown.’

  Her uncle’s smile was quick and rueful. ‘This is what happens at a certain age, Rebecca, your children start nannying you. You don’t have any children, do you?’ The expression in her uncle’s face was mild, but some note in his voice made her heart beat faster.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, there’s still time.’ He turned to Storm. ‘What are you up to today?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Storm yawned. ‘There’s a party Evan and I want to go to.’

  ‘Why don’t you take Rebecca with you?’ Her uncle turned to her. ‘Would you like to go?’

  She saw Storm’s body reach the pool and falter, almost imperceptibly. Then he kept walking.

  ‘Ah, he didn’t hear you.’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  ‘No,’ her uncle gave her another kindly, open, yet somehow manufactured smile, ‘I’ll tell you what, we’ll go sailing, if not this weekend then the next. As a family.’

  The sands of the beach were warm, even though a layer of high translucent cloud hid the sun. You have to keep an eye out. Don’t go too far from the house. The tide comes in quickly. When it comes in there is no beach. You don’t want to be swimming home. The undertow will take you down. Julia’s many warnings – about the tide, the motorcycle taxis, the mini-buses squashing twenty-five people in a space designed for twelve – rang in her mind.

  She set out walking to the headland, perhaps a kilometre away. Beyond it was a cove she’d seen from the terrace of the house. The cliffs she passed were of a fine-grained peach sand, pockmarked with pied kingfisher nests. The birds appeared in the entrance of their holes, shook their heads at her, then crept back into their tunnels.

  Houses lined the low cliff above in two or three-acre intervals. Each of these was connected to their parcel of beach by a stone staircase. The stone was weathered and pitted almost to pumice. She had read that these staircases were once a supply route; dhows would sidle up to the cliffs and deliver goods to the house and to the villages beyond. There were few roads in those days. Life was conducted by sea.

  She saw a figure in the distance, someone sitting alone, hunched over on the sand.

  As she approached the figure did not lift his head. Nothing in Storm’s posture or demeanor suggested invitation. She stopped several metres away from him.

  He stood with a jolt. On the sand where his legs had been was an oval. In the distance it had looked to her like a rock, a piece of driftwood. It was shiny, olive-coloured. Its edges were neatly scalloped.

  She leaned towards it and the oval-shaped object moved.

  ‘They retract their head and legs when they’re threatened.’ He leaned down to pick it up.

  He turned the oval. She peered down a dark funnel. She saw a glint. Two small eyes stared out at her from the darkness.

  ‘There you are,’ she said.

  He raised his eyes towards her and gave her a shocking smile. ‘The tide’s coming in,’ he said. ‘There you go. Take it easy.’

  The turtle crawled towards the tideline. At the lip of the ocean it hesitated. The turtle was washed by a single wave; it floated, buffeted by sea. Then it began paddling. They watched as it melted into the waves.

  They walked back to the house. He told her about the turtles that nested along the coast, how the females lumbered up the beach under the cover of darkness to lay their eggs, how he had helped countless hatchlings run the gauntlet of gulls on their arduous journey to the edge of the ocean. The sun came out. Under its glare the sea turned a hot garnet.

  When they arrived back at the house Julia was getting out of her car, a dull silver Land Cruiser. Julia wore a white semi-transparent shirt, a green-and-turquoise bikini beneath it. A slim silver bangle rested on her upper arm.

  Julia’s eye flickered over them. ‘Where have you two been?’

  ‘I went for a walk on the beach and bumped into Storm.’ Her explanation was completely true, but Julia’s eye shuttled back and forth between them.

  ‘Can I help with the shopping?’ she offered.

  ‘No, the staff will bring it in.’ Julia pressed the horn twice. Grace and Michael, the gardener, appeared. Julia turned to her. ‘I thought we could do one of our little walks.’

  She had begun to help Julia on her patrols of the house to dust and rearrange its many objects. They both seemed to delight in this. The orphan part of her enjoyed following her aunt around the house; she was an audience, but perhaps this is what children are, she thought: audience and adoring companion.

  Julia looked so much like her mother from behind, her trim legs, which emerged from hips perched high in a slightly swayed back. But when Julia turned around the illusion was shattered. Her hair had been expensively coloured in striations of dark honey, platinum, even a faint note of pink. Her mother’s hair had been naturally golden in the sun, and her nails had always been unvarnished, bitten at the rims, unlike Julia’s perfectly manicured hands.

  They walked from one end of the five-acre parcel of land to the other, where seedlings grew in the herb garden encased in mesh to protect it from the monkeys. Plated lizards scattered at their approach; she saw only the chevron of their tails and their stout babies’ legs thrashing away through the undergrowth.

  Julia recited the names of the trees and flowers that flourished in the perimeter and gardens of the house. There were neem, mbambakofi and Indian almond trees, as well as the fern-like casuarinas, which grew well in sandy soil. The coral creeper, its warm pastel pink flowers, climbed high into the upper branches of the neem. Three types of palm grew on their land, the golden, lala and coconut palms. Two small baobabs grew on the terraces down to the ocean. ‘It will only take a thousand years for them to mature,’ Julia said.

  She marched behind her aunt, the gold axe of the sun cleaving her head in two. ‘Hibiscus,’ Julia said, pointing to a crimson flower, so bright it almost throbbed. ‘Alamander – that’s the flower that grows through the louvres in the downstairs bathroom.’ They stopped by the cerise desert rose and thin urns containing a narrow-growing plant called mother-in-law’s tongue.

  The showpiece of the house were the clouds of bougainvillea that fell over its white coral walls. It grew in three colours – fuchsia, a deep, rich red and a delicate white. It was these leaves that blew down the night-time corridors of the house to be captured by Grace and her broom in the mornings.

  ‘It’s so fertile here.’

  ‘You can grow anything, but the monkeys will eat it. They trashed the hibiscus last year. Bill had to shoot them away from the golden palm fruit with his air rifle.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘They look tame, but don’t be fooled. They’re vicious.’

  She had seen them in the trees a couple of times already, looking at her with their amber eyes. She didn’t understand how monkeys could be vicious – mischievous, yes. But then she imagined Julia had fought and lost many wars with them, losing papayas left to ripen on the kitchen counter, or
cooling cakes uncovered within the grasp of the louvre windows.

  ‘Lucy never took an interest in the garden, and my friends live in the city.’ Julia gave her no sense of how these two statements were related or what had provoked them. ‘They come down twice a year, at Christmas and August.’ Julia looked away, towards the sea. ‘It’s too exotic for some of them. They can’t handle the fact that a plated lizard darts out from underneath the freezer. And lately of course they’re afraid for other reasons. They don’t want to risk running roadblocks.’

  Julia stopped and squinted unhappily at a fern-like plant in a pot whose tips had turned a grainy white. ‘Look, the dudus are after my bonsai golden palm.’

  She thought of the threads of spider webs that parted against her skin as she walked through the house. Spiders wove webs everywhere overnight – on the stairs, in the corners of her room. Morning exposed the overnight missions of ants, who had found mysterious lucre hidden under Julia’s prized goat hair carpet.

  They came upon a cone-shaped anthill of dust. This was the efflux of the white ants that were eating their way through the house, and which were also in the process of shattering Julia’s prized mangrove sculptures and the timber beams, as well as pulverising the thick-spined leather volumes on the bookshelf by the baraza. Thin rivers of ants poured into the house from the garden, everywhere.

  ‘I’ve never seen so many insects in my life.’

  ‘I rub the walls with cloves, that’s the only thing to do, it goes back to the first Arabs who came here,’ Julia said. ‘Ants hate the smell. Still, I wonder if one day I’ll be walking through the living room and I’ll just hear a giant whoosh!’ Julia threw her hands up in the air, startling her. ‘And the house will collapse around me like a piece of scenery.’

  It rained that afternoon. A hush came over the garden. Even the constant sigh of the sea was muted. To quell her restlessness she helped Grace sweep the patio and pull up the weeds that pushed their way through the thinnest of fissures in the tiles. Through all of this Grace looked at her with an absent wonder, as if a giraffe had suddenly appeared and started sweeping the floor.

  On one of these cleaning missions she dusted the bookshelf. She ran her eyes along the books, their titles in faded gold emboss: The Conquest of Lake Victoria; An Encyclopedia of Seashells; Vanishing Africa.

  She pulled out an imposing book titled Dhows. On the flyleaf she saw Bill’s name and then, with love from Julia, in memory of Dar to Zanzibar by dhow.

  The introduction told her that the boats were first sailed by the Sumerians and the Phoenicians; it was thought that Noah’s Ark had been a dhow. The names of their designs sounded like diseases or incantations: sambuk and baggala were large, cargo-carrying dhows that looked like Elizabethan galleons; the ngalawa were an outrigger canoe-type fishing boat favoured by fishermen all along the Indian Ocean coast; the jahazi was a small fishing dhow and was the version favoured locally. The dhow’s sails looked triangular but were actually quadrilateral. They were made from a cotton called madrouf, the book told her. The mainsail was called a lateen.

  She heard the castanet trill of the yellow-rumped tinkerbird. Then the nasal slew of the trumpeter hornbills as they swayed back and forth in the thinnest top branches of the casuarinas, hooting as if on a funfair ride. She found a pair of binoculars on the baraza just in time to spot an Amani sunbird, a small woodland sunbird with a bottle-green head, white breast with a flash of scarlet near its wing. In Gariseb her observations of birds were confined to the hours just before dawn or at dusk. In between rounds, operations, medical team and logistics meetings, lunch breaks and tea breaks consumed her time. The fact that her days were now free to observe animals and birds elicited a furtive guilt.

  Where was Julia? It was five o’clock. The refrigerator’s hum filled the empty house. Julia usually left a note on the table. There was never any salutation, no Dear Rebecca, only instructions: There’s dhal in the fridge. There’s fresh lemonade. Help yourself.

  She went into the kitchen. Storm was leaning on the counter.

  ‘Where’s Julia – where’s your mother?’

  ‘She told me to take you fishing.’

  ‘She did?’

  ‘Yes. The day after tomorrow. The tides are right. We need to get up at four thirty.’

  ‘Oh.’ She looked around the house, as if someone might appear to help explain this puzzling turn of events. ‘Fine then,’ she said. Then, ‘I’d like that.’

  She turned and realised as she did she didn’t know where she was going. She walked across the living room with the unmistakable sensation of being watched. His eyes were on her back; their impress was light, questioning. She stopped to look at five small discs of wood mounted on the wall of the house. She had seen them before, but in the way of the house, so full of driftwood sculptures, lanterns and fabrics, she had tuned them out. Two showed a crescent moon and a star. Three seemed to have a miniature ship in their middle.

  ‘They’re the eyes.’

  She nearly jumped. She hadn’t heard him follow her.

  ‘Eyes?’

  ‘Of the dhow. All dhows have them. This one,’ he pointed to the star and moon combination, ‘is on one side of the bow, the eye is on the other. The moon and the stars symbolise navigation, the eye is to ward off the evil eye.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You mean you really haven’t heard of the evil eye?’

  ‘I’m a doctor. A rationalist,’ she added, for good measure.

  ‘Bad spirits.’

  ‘Oh, a superstition.’

  ‘No, more real than that.’ He turned back to the eyes. ‘I got them for Mum in Puku. They’re from two dhows that were scuttled. They were about to throw them away. They’ve been at sea for hundreds of years, some of them. When they take apart a dhow it’s almost as if they’re dismembering a person.’

  She was transfixed by the look of sorrow on his face then, by the way it had cast steel shadows along his brow, his mouth.

  Outside, mosque swallows cut through the air. He stared into the sky, following the birds. ‘They’re heading home for the night. They nest in the minarets.’

  ‘What other birds are around now?’

  ‘Trumpeter hornbills, because the neem is in flower,’ he said. ‘There’s an osprey that fishes right in front of the house. And a Wahlberg’s eagle or two down the beach.’

  ‘I love their colour. Like salted toffee.’

  ‘You know them?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Why are you so interested in birds?’ he asked.

  ‘There are so many of them, and they’re all different. It seems a miracle of evolution that in one place you have a starling with a scarlet breast, and in another place it’s golden. They’re not really part of our lives. They don’t belong to our dimension.’

  She waited to see what he would make of this, watching his face for clues. ‘I like them too,’ he said.

  He walked back into the house. She watched him go. He never said hello or goodbye, he never excused himself in any way. Perhaps this was the reason for the strange abandonment she felt whenever he left the room.

  A brochure lay on the dining room table. A note was scrawled on a Post-It: Thought you might be interested. Jx

  She told Grace she was going into town. Before she even reached the road a motorcycle taxi sidled up to her; its driver had spotted her walking down the lane. She could not walk anywhere on the main road by herself without twenty motorcycle taxi drivers stopping next to her within minutes. Want a ride? Want a ride? When she said she did not they were affronted. She relented eventually and hopped on, riding pillion behind a thin young man.

  He left her at the entrance fifteen minutes later. She braved an onslaught of young men selling coconuts at the gate. She looked into one man’s eyes, which were rimmed with red. He lopped off the top of a coconut to reveal a reservoir of water. She was not thirsty but she bought one anyway. As soon as she had, the others pressed around her. She handed them co
ins, which they took in the pale centres of their palms and stared at as if she’d just handed them an insect.

  She walked down a lane shaded by tobacco-hued sycamore fig trees. The ruined city came upon her slowly; a square arch eaten alive by the root of one of the fig trees, a low maze of chocolate stones, ankle height, the foundations of what would once have been a street. After the steel heat of the town, the ruins were cool and quiet. From its margins she heard the clicks of monkeys. She became aware of lithe forms winding themselves around branches.

  ‘Cool day, isn’t it?’

  The voice came from behind her. She turned around to see a woman dressed in black sitting on the perimeter fence of the ruins, surrounded by a group of grey and russet monkeys.

  ‘It’s pretty hot.’

  ‘I meant cool as in nice.’

  ‘You’re American.’

  ‘Sort of. You look new,’ the woman said.

  ‘I am.’

  The woman made no move to descend from the fence. Four monkeys flanked her on either side. The woman exchanged a knowing look with the monkeys, who cast their faces downward and looked uncertainly at their palms.

  ‘Don’t come any closer for the moment.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The monkeys don’t know you.’

  ‘Will they attack me? ‘

  ‘No, but they might run away.’

  ‘Do you work here?’

  ‘I do. I’m an archaeologist.’ The woman was slight, with dark brown hair just visible under her hat. Her eyes were large and glossy. She looked like a fawn. She might be very young, or her own age. She had nothing to do with her mental picture of an archaeologist – hard, sunburnt women dressed in khakis. ‘How about you?’

  ‘I’m a doctor.’

  ‘Oh, cool. Do you work here?’

  ‘No, in the highlands. I’ve been there for four months. I’m down on the coast visiting family.’ She had been practicing this litany for just such an occasion. It rolled off her tongue convincingly smoothly.

  The woman remained sitting on the stone wall. The sun drilled into her. She moved into the shade.