The Dhow House

by Jean McNeil

  ‘I am well, thank you.’

  ‘I am glad to hear that. Allahu Akbar.’

  He frowned. ‘Are you a Muslim?’

  ‘No, but I thank Allah for his grace.’

  ‘I wanted to ask you if I could listen to the BBC. It is where I learned my English, from the World Service. It would give me great pleasure to hear it again.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can do that.’

  Ali lowered his cup and fixed her with a grave, certain look. ‘I only want to listen to the English.’

  ‘I believe you. But I don’t know if my director will.’

  Ali put his cup down on the ground. ‘I thought you were in charge here.’

  ‘No, I’m only a doctor.’

  They looked at each other. The formality of their conversation, the upright, manufactured tone of his supposed radio-learned English, the gravity of Ali’s eyes, were for a moment so overwhelming that it threatened to tip over into the absurd. She had to fight against an impulse to laugh. She might be a bit hysterical, with the heat, the hours, the pressure. She hadn’t laughed in a month.

  ‘You need to get your bandage changed. Go see Alan in the nurses’ tent. Announce yourself first. He is not expecting you.’

  Ali smiled. ‘We are none of us expecting anything here.’

  She watched him cross the courtyard. When he was out of sight she took out the notebook she carried in a money-belt-type pouch next to her body and wrote: Ali. Nom de guerre. Speaks English. One for AC?

  Among the ten days he was in camp were days she would later forget. Or rather it was not that she forgot – each day was subtly different in the dilemmas it presented: a case of anemia, two children with rickets, an elderly man in the grip of malaria – but days when violence did not tear the fabric of their lives somehow failed to cohere in her mind.

  ‘You need to get into the habit of keeping a diary,’ Anthony had told her soon after their first meeting in London. ‘Make it a medical diary, but write anything that comes up in code. Decide on one – medicines, procedures, parts of human anatomy. I leave it up to you.’

  She had enjoyed this part of her task. She decided on arteries for news she heard, anecdotally from her patients, or in her eavesdropping missions around camp: carotid artery presents oxygenated blood flow. Platelets advancing to hippocampus translated as: news heard that Al-Nur is advancing from the interior to the coastal capital, Port Al-Saidi. She came up with an emergency code consisting entirely of anti-malarials: chloroquine, atovaquone, progruanil hydrochloride, doxycycline.

  It must have been later that week when she finished a repair job, not particularly challenging. Femoral artery of the left leg, frayed but not severed by metal shards from an exploded RPG. Shrapnel came in several disguises, but the blackened residue at the edges of ragged epidermis betrayed the culprit.

  She peeled off her gloves and went to stand at the door of the tent. The sun fell on the perimeter of the tented verandah. She wanted to smoke, to drink, to stand on her head. But the nearest cigarette was two hundred and seventy kilometres away, and she didn’t smoke anyway. She tried to remember if a swash remained in the bottle of the contraband vodka she and her colleagues kept stashed under her bed, away from the breathalyser eyes of the Christian logistics organisation. She might have downed it the week before in a similar frenzy of remorse, she couldn’t remember.

  A bustard – black bellied, she guessed, from the dark shadow on its underside – winged across the sky like a scar.

  She went to visit Aisha. She had been living in the Vango tent for two weeks. She refused to speak to men, Andy had told her.

  They sat cross-legged on the ground in the meagre shade thrown by a whistling thorn. The camel sat next to them, its long legs folded primly under its body.

  ‘Do you know about the Wir?’

  La, she said. No.

  ‘You people call it luck,’ she said.

  ‘What is it then?’

  Aisha thought for a moment. ‘Justice.’

  She knew the word in Arabic – eadala. She knew that people who lived ruined lives clung to justice over luck. She could hardly blame them for being unconvinced that ordinary humans were responsible for their suffering

  Two months before she had left England an expert from the School of Oriental and African Studies had come to speak to them, a strikingly handsome professor with dark malachite eyes. For the Bora and the Nisa alike, he’d told them, spirit possession meant being in the grip of an external force much more powerful than yourself. Attempts to tame or understand it were futile. For them, these forces represented not ecstasy, nor exorcism, nor possession, only a geometry of the soul and a restitution of order.

  She’d worked in places in the grip of similar beliefs: spirit-dogs that stalked the living, harbouring souls of the dead; vultures that were actually someone or other’s great-grandfather given wings. Dark fortune lapped effortlessly at the edges of villages razed by rebel forces or visited by famine. She was chastened by the relentlessness of this moral system and she was too tired, these days, to challenge another culture’s shamanism. So she did not tell Aisha what she herself believed: that nothing else existed other than human order and morality, human cruelty and human chaos.

  She lacked the Arabic to say all this, besides, she no longer had to be right, she no longer wanted to change things. She felt muted, she had felt this way for some time. She seemed to be entering a new phase of life. She was getting used to existence, finally. She felt the pleasant authority of maturity settle within her, but also, connected to it, something dulled, like old silver.

  She excused herself and rose. Aisha smiled and thanked her for her visit. She had filled out, somewhat. Her vital signs and iron count had improved.

  She walked towards her office. The wind picked up, ruffling the valence of the giant tent. She ought to do paperwork. She didn’t know why she was standing, looking out again into a land that gave nothing back, save for the edge of a burning column of setting sun.

  Aisha’s camel levered himself to his feet at the same moment she had risen. He floated towards her. For him the sight of her had become the equivalent of passing a Sainsbury’s on a wet night. He plodded in her direction.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid of him?’ Andy had materialised beside her. ‘Camels are vicious buggers.’

  ‘Not this one.’ She waited until the camel filled their vision with his worn doormat nose and chocolate eyes. ‘I’ve named him Montague.’

  Andy nodded. ‘He looks like a Montague.’

  ‘Stay still or he’ll know you’re afraid,’ she instructed. The camel’s long neck extended in Andy’s direction. Andy shrank back. She put a hand on the camel’s nose. Immediately his neck drooped. He uttered a low rumble.

  ‘You’ve gone right native,’ Andy said.

  Andy left and Montague wandered back to the umbrella thorn he had been stripping of its leaves. Her eye caught a smudge in the sand near the operating theatre tent. Its glossy hue meant oil, diesel or blood. Possibly all three. The heat was thinning. In the sky was a watermelon sunset.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you.’

  He stood in his white shirt and torn black trousers. His beard was immaculately trimmed and a pencil was shoved behind his ear. He looked like a village schoolmaster.

  ‘My people are coming to get me.’

  ‘You are not yet healed.’

  ‘This camp is not well defended.’

  She stiffened. ‘Is that a warning?’

  ‘They might think that you will not give me up. I can’t communicate with them to tell them otherwise. I need a radio.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Are you a Shakespearean?’ he asked.

  ‘Not particularly. Why?’

  ‘I have a quotation that might interest you. Something I learned on the radio.’

  A voice called her name with the sharp urgency of something gone wrong. She bolted. After two strides she turned back to Ali, but he had melted away behind her. She never dis
covered which play he was so eager to recite.

  III

  RED-CHESTED CUCKOO

  ‘I planned the dinner party long before you came,’ Julia said. ‘Before we even knew you were coming.’

  She nodded. ‘I hope it’s not inconvenient.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Her aunt gestured to the fridge. ‘You’re just going to have to fit in. Would you mind taking the prawns from the freezer?’

  She rummaged in the depths of the freezer, groping past tuna steaks, Italian ice cream and a frosted bottle of Jägermeister.

  Julia sounded annoyed. She felt trapped. What could she do? She called Margaux that afternoon, but she was away in Bahari ya Manda, renewing her visa.

  She stood, awkward and exposed, in the living room as the guests arrived. There were two couples, neighbours who lived in Oleander House and Zanj Mansion up the road. Then Evan’s family arrived. Although she couldn’t be sure if the man was Evan’s father or his uncle. No one introduced themselves. They seemed to expect that she should know who they were. After an hour of conversation she could still not fit faces to roles. She drank four glasses of wine in quick succession. She had an impression that she’d always been there, around Julia’s dinner table, but for some reason the hundreds of dinners she had eaten had been erased from her memory.

  Julia gave her a place at the table across from Storm. The table was lit with hurricane lamps. Julia had placed the lamps inside sprays of bougainvillea. The light was filtered through the delicate cerise flowers, casting them all in its glow.

  At one point she turned to Julia, intending to offer some automatic pleasantry about the food, and had run into Storm’s gaze.

  ‘Why did you become a doctor?’ His question was thrown across the table like a challenge.

  ‘Because I wanted to help people.’

  ‘And do you?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  She did not know if anyone had overheard them. In the corner of her eye she saw Julia flash them a steady, practiced look. She turned to talk to Evan’s uncle – at last she determined this was what he was. He had been a road engineer, he had told her, but was retired now. ‘I keep my hand in by building swimming pools. In fact I built this one –’ he gestured to the black rectangle of water, just beyond the perimeter of light. ‘It beats camping out for months in Sierra Leone with only warm Coke to drink.’

  She flicked her eyes in Storm’s direction. He was laughing, open-mouthed, at something Evan had said.

  ‘These young people,’ the man said. ‘They’re all so competitive now. It was never like that, for me. We didn’t have much to compete over – no Go-Pros, no Canon Mark Sixes, or whatever the model is now. I have to buy them all for my son, just so he can keep his mates’ respect. That’s what he tells me anyway. In my day we were lucky if we had a car. In fact I had to ask to borrow my father’s, and he charged me for petrol.’

  The hurricane lamps fizzed with random flares of paraffin, mafuta ya taa. Julia had taught her the Swahili term, along with mshumaa – candle. She loved the swish of the words, how they sounded reluctant to let go of themselves.

  As they spoke she tried to catch Storm’s eye. She didn’t know how to read his tone, she realised. In fact she had no idea what he was thinking. All the clues she had learned to decipher and which had worked so well in her favour – the angle of a glance, the set of a mouth, a drift in the eye, a restless right hand – failed her with him. With another corner of her mind she registered Storm’s astonishing effect in the dark light of the dinner table. He was at that fleeting point in life where beauty had the immovable density of fact, like wars or diseases.

  The beauty she encountered in this country was not of any stripe she had met before. In part it was the sun, she supposed, the climate and the outdoor life they made possible. In England these people would look quite ordinary, but here they had taken on the sheen of demi-gods. She had never trusted beauty; beautiful people’s faces were sculpted by other people’s gaze, by the certainty that they will be looked at, and so they never fully belonged to themselves.

  The guests went home at eleven. She woke hours later to a thud somewhere within the house. It was difficult to tell where the sound, dull and insistent, emanated from. She padded down the stairs.

  A figure gleamed in the twilight. It stood next to the pool. In its hand was a rope. Storm turned at the sound of her step. Beyond him, over the lip of the low cliff, dawn was soaking the horizon with opalescent light. His body was dense with shadow. He held up the rope, which spasmed and twitched three-quarters of the way down its body.

  She took a step back just as he turned and walked out to the edge of the patio, beyond the infinity pool. She watched his shoulder blade tense. He drew his arm back and released it – a taut, powerful throw. The snake went flying over the cliff.

  He did not turn back towards her, but walked out into the garden.

  She stayed at the bottom of the stairs, a shock reverberating through her. He did not want her in the house, in the family, he did not want her anywhere.

  She returned to her room. She thought of what she had witnessed the night before from the top of the stairs. Did he know she had seen them? Was that the reason for his hostility. But what had she seen exactly? Young men could have tactile friendships – she knew this from the field, from the army – that they were intimate with each other in a way that women seldom were. She could not say what Evan’s hands on her cousin’s head had been about. Only that the gesture she had witnessed carried a charge. Their nakedness, too, had seemed a deliberate provocation – but to whom? To each other? To Julia, or even her?

  What spooked her most was the lack of recognition in Storm’s eyes when they looked at each other. At times he looked at her as if he really never had seen her before. With this was an absence fellow-feeling so profound it pitched her into a pit of loneliness.

  Perhaps she would take his cue and leave. She fell asleep again that night rehearsing explanations: called back to work, called back to England. She would never have the conversations she craved with Julia, and which might illuminate her origins, and more. She would never really know Lucy or Storm. Family would remain for her a distant country she had once visited, before a nameless insurrection forced her to flee.

  4.30am. It was the day he promised to take her fishing. She opened one eye and levered herself out of bed. Downstairs, Storm was waiting.

  They left the house in silence. At the boatyard, Storm did not speak but gestured to what he wanted her to do. They worked quickly, their headlamps illuminating the ropes, the rudder of the outboard motor, the luminous white of sails in the half-dawn.

  The sea was almost silent. The boat slid through the water. There was no wind. Beyond the breakers the hurricane lamps of the fishing dhows glowed.

  They sailed out of the mouth of the inlet. ‘We have to run through the reef,’ he said. ‘The tide is a bit lower than I’d like. That’s why I’m not speaking. I have to concentrate.’ He sounded almost contrite.

  Breakers on the reef formed a silver ribbon. He steered the boat straight into them. For a minute the boat was buffeted. It rose and fell sharply, the hull landing with a dull smack on the water. By the time they passed beyond the reef, a pale lustre stalked the horizon. In twenty minutes’ time this would become the sun.

  He released the throttle. He lunged forward and untied the sail, then hoisted it. Wind caught the mainsail. It billowed with a sound like gas blooming from a stove. He put out the longline; it unfurled from a spool attached to the gunwale.

  ‘I’m going to take down the sail. We’ll use the motor. Fishing from sailboats is never easy and the wind’s going to pick up. You take the tiller. If I tell you, pull the engine cord. It’s going to be a bit unstable for a minute.’

  He pulled down the sail. She watched his manoeuvres with attention, as if she might be called upon to perform them, unaided, at any moment.

  He sat down across from her. ‘I’ll take the tiller, you watch for fish.’
<
br />   ‘How long do we have to stay out here?’

  ‘Until we get a fish. We have to wait for the tide before running in again anyway.’

  ‘Did Julia – did your mother tell you that you had to spend time with me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about your father?’

  ‘They thought you’d like to see how we live, what we like to do. So here we are. It’s nice in the morning.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m not very good at all this.’

  ‘At what?’

  ‘Keeping still. Waiting.’

  He turned his face away. She could see the thin muscles of his cheek flexing.

  When he turned back towards her, darkness had settled in one side of his face.

  ‘We didn’t know you existed. She told Lucy and me by Skype, before you came. Lucy lives in England, although you probably know that. She just said, your cousin is coming to stay and we were both like, who? I don’t think we even realised that Mum had a sister. Or we knew, but we’d forgotten.’

  The effort of expelling these words seemed to cause him great pain. They both stared at the horizon in silence. There, two early morning kayakers were hardening into silhouettes.

  Storm is my cousin. The phrase installed itself in her head, in a different voice. He is my family. Until that moment her inner voice had always been her own. She was careful not to reply to the voice directly, to ask, who are you? This would confirm that another self inhabited her, an interloper she might not know.

  The hollows in his cheeks had deepened. She thought again how the filament of a body’s energy, the totality of it, could coalesce in a face. It was uncommon for this to happen. Perhaps it was this intensity, rather than beauty strictly speaking, which made it so difficult not to look at him. His face seemed to be channelling his spirit’s intention to live; and not only his, but hers, or anyone’s.

  The fishing line zinged taut. They both looked at it as if they had forgotten it was there. A silver body sliced through the ocean towards them. Its body tore the surface open in a neat white scar. Suddenly it was in the boat. She saw a steel, panicked eye.