The Dhow House

by Jean McNeil

  It bounced on the deck, hurtling from freeboard to seat to floor. She stood on the plastic bench ranged around the stern of the boat to escape its thrash. The fish was the yellow of marigolds as it came out of the water. In front of her eyes the yellow turned blue. Its colour faltered and its body shivered. The blue became unstable. Green dots began to thicken on its skin. The fish kept its eye on her, inside it a glossy hope. But the sharp gaze of it was clouding.

  Storm turned his body towards her, one hand still on the steering wheel.

  ‘Just whack it. Otherwise it suffers.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Come on, you’re a doctor. Here.’ He reached with his spare hand and passed her a long wooden club. ‘Or it will take a long time to die.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  He took the club from her hands. She darted her eyes away. She heard a dull thud as he pounded the head of the fish. When she looked back she saw the fish’s body was changing again. Its skin shivered, the blue turning to copper. Light rippled along its body, pinks, purples, the speckled brown of trout. Then a cold blue, like the storm skies of the Kusi monsoon, as it died.

  They arrived back to an empty house. Storm left the fish in the sink for Grace to prepare, then went upstairs to sleep. The early morning start, the heat and the exposure of the trip had exhausted them both.

  That afternoon she had arranged to meet Margaux at the ruins. They took a motorcycle taxi to a shady café with a view over the ocean.

  ‘Don’t you find it hot, all that black?’

  ‘It’s my favourite colour, I’m hardly going to stop wearing it just because it’s a little warm.’

  ‘Margaux, it’s 30 degrees.’

  ‘Could be five degrees hotter. You should come in December.’

  The day was still and the café terrace was empty apart from a trim tanned man reading the Guardian Weekly. Something about him attracted her attention. He wore the usual coastal uniform for men: a T-shirt, surfer shorts and flip-flops, but there was something odd about his square-shaped head and a face that seemed to want spectacles perched upon it.

  ‘The local spook,’ Margaux said, keeping her voice low.

  ‘British or American?’

  ‘US Naval intelligence. They’re up and down the coast, looking for Radical Islam. His name is Bob and he’s a sports fisherman, but he never goes fishing. Maybe the State Department is going through an austerity period and can’t advance him the eight hundred dollars a day he’d need to maintain his cover.’

  She laughed. It was refreshing to talk to someone so cynical, after the hushed, almost clerical endeavour of Gariseb, and the devotion to wealth and ease that seemed to reign over the Dhow House.

  Margaux winked just as the man turned another page of his newspaper. She saw him take advantage of the moment to inspect them.

  ‘He should try to look a bit more dissolute. He looks like he’s just stepped off an aircraft carrier.’

  ‘He probably has. Before him was Keith, and before him Gary.’ Margaux raised her eyebrows as she recited their names, to signal their falsity. ‘All from Quantico.’ Margaux shook her head. ‘Everyone in town knows who they are. Even the waiters, the imports and now you.’ She gave a satisfied smile. ‘The chances of an Al-Nur insurgent falling across their path are practically zero.’

  ‘Imports?’

  ‘That’s what locals call people from the UK, the US. White people from other countries.’

  ‘Do imports come on holiday here, or come to live?’

  ‘They come to stay. But they’ll always be called imports. You don’t like the term much.’

  She shook her head. ‘It smacks of eugenics experiments. Imported bloodstock. But I can see the logic of it. I’ve never felt more foreign. In the house they don’t know what to do with me. They can’t talk business with me, they can’t talk about safari trips, lodges in Zambia, horseback riding in Botswana, they can’t talk about dinner parties they host in the capital or golf or property developments.’ She sighed. ‘I think I bore them.’

  ‘I’m not sure I should say this, but I think most people find your aunt and uncle hard to talk to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Maybe you don’t realise just how successful they’ve been. Everything they have ever done has turned to gold, from your aunt’s interior design business to your uncle’s investments. Everyone knows this and is in awe of their good… fortune.’ Margaux said, her hesitation lingering between them. ‘That’s my anthropological assessment of the situation, for what it’s worth.’

  ‘They see it as good fortune and not good judgement?’

  ‘Judgement doesn’t apply in Africa.’ Margaux’s heavy-lidded face drew itself into a sly smile. ‘In any case, it’s all about to be derailed.’

  ‘By what?’

  ‘The roadblocks, embassy no-travel directives, the spooks. By Al-Nur, if they get half a chance. So far they haven’t been very together. I think they’re waging some factional war within. But it’s just a matter of time.’

  She allowed her eyes to drift back to the spook. He was still there, nursing a coffee that had long gone cold.

  ‘So what are you going to do when your two months here are up?’

  ‘I’ll go back to Gariseb. I’ve got another six months. My contract is for a year.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I might do emergency medicine in London again. That keeps you sharp. Sharper than a war zone.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘More variety of cases, more diagnostic possibilities.’

  A contemplative look settled on Margaux’s face. ‘I don’t think I’d be able to take it. It’s too harrowing.’

  A moment fell between them. She decided she should return Margaux’s inquiries about her profession.

  ‘What are you finding in your excavations?

  ‘Clues to the social structure of the original civilisation. Iconography, pottery, that sort of thing. There’s evidence people traded widely in the city, but no one can explain how Venetian glass got here. Especially because it carbon dates to before the arrival of the Portuguese. I suppose ultimately we’re looking for why the inhabitants abandoned it. Was it an Arab raiding party, on their way to found Bahari ya Manda? Was it local warfare, nomadic clans from the desert muscling in?’

  ‘When did that happen?’

  ‘In the late eleventh century, then they came back in the thirteenth century, then again after the arrival of the Portuguese. That’s when the city became unviable for the last time.’

  The monkeys surrounded them. She hadn’t heard them coming but suddenly they thumped and rustled as they flung themselves from tree to tree, causing showers of leaves and seeds to coat their table.

  ‘They’re here, too, even by the ocean.’

  ‘They’re everywhere there’s food to eat,’ Margaux said. ‘They were here long before we arrived, and they’ll be here long after.’

  By the time they parted the spook had left, gathering up his paper and shielding his eyes with mirrored sunglasses. Margaux touched her fingers to the brim of her sunhat in a strangely military gesture. ‘See you,’ she called.

  She walked the sandy access road to the tarmac. On either side were small patches of cultivated maize, which she’d heard Julia call shambas. Sunflowers poked their heads above the maize. She walked through a cage of shadows thrown by thin, towering coconut palms. She felt the pull of the house for the first time, heard its message, the magnetic frequency on which it broadcast. Its siren call sounded not unlike the Asr, the afternoon prayer that drifted above Kilindoni from the muezzin’s towers. Come back, Rebecca, please.

  They drove the coastal highway, which followed the edge of the land, hugging mangrove-gnarled inlets, salt flats and pockets of dense forest. Villages clung to the perimeter of the road, their houses made of ochre mud held upright by a cage of wattle. They passed men pulling two-wheeled ox carts with unidentifiable heaps in their wagons covered in jute. Shaded groves of young casuarinas shive
red in the breeze.

  Moholo was the real resort on this stretch of the ocean, she had gathered. Kilindoni had only two hotels used by package tours from the UK, Italy and Germany. In Moholo there were more than a dozen.

  As they approached the town a flurry of billboards appeared at the roadside – Five Islands Hotel, Fitzgerald’s, Marlin Bay Ocean Resort, the Sahara restaurant and bar. They were sun-bleached and tattered, with the exception of Fitzgerald’s, which has its own helicopter pad, someone – it must have been Julia or Margaux – had told her. It was the choice hotel of millionaires, with the best sports fishing north of Durban, and only three hours from Johannesburg by Lear Jet. One South African industrialist flew up in his private plane every week, Margaux had told her, just to hook marlin and billfish off the reefs of the warm ocean.

  Storm’s face was a study in concentration as he drove. He negotiated the obstacle course the road generated, the motorbike taxis which appeared from side roads and lanes and whose drivers careened onto the road without looking, the tuk-tuks chugging at twenty kilometres an hour, the wobbling cyclists and gloomy cows on rope leashes tended by children carrying sticks.

  ‘You never answered my question.’

  She darted him a look. ‘What question?’

  ‘Why you wanted to be a doctor.’

  ‘I told you, I wanted to be useful.’

  ‘To whom?’

  ‘To society. To life.’ She laughed. ‘There aren’t many things you can do in this world which directly contribute to life and not death.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean there is no neutrality in our existences. You can always trace a line from your actions and consequences, and know whether those consequences are good or bad.’

  She turned back to watch the life of the road. She didn’t know why she was telling him this. Conversations with him appeared from nowhere and quickly went astray. It made her nervous, how quickly he tempted her into such moral equivalences. She didn’t like the sound of her hazy assertions or her sacrificial offerings of vulnerability. In any case with Storm they failed to provoke intimacy, or even understanding. She had never encountered this before, with another human being – that her well-practiced admissions widened the gulf between them.

  ‘What about the army. Isn’t that about death?’

  ‘No, it’s about limiting damage, death included.’

  ‘So it wasn’t actually about being a doctor?’ he said.

  ‘No, I love medicine. You can’t make it through medical school without having an affinity for it.’

  This wasn’t entirely true – she’d known people at medical school who could just as easily have been stockbrokers, lawyers, army majors. They’d chosen medicine for its social influence, and then had to deal with their recoil when they understood just how much information they had to acquire, how much responsibility travelled with it.

  ‘What do you think I should do with my life?’

  She looked out the window, considering her answer. Stray piebald goats stared back with their yellow eyes.

  ‘I think you should just follow your instincts.’

  He shot her a questioning look. Normally she would have been grateful for any sign of ambivalence from him. But now that it came to her she rebuffed it, and looked out the window instead, seeing the firefly makaa braziers in the forest, the thin boys cycling, tottering on the edge of the asphalt, daring the bus drivers not to kill them.

  Ragged memories settled in her like a flock of crows. Gower Street in the rain, cramming on defibrillation from textbooks on the upper deck of the bus, late for class, running computer models until two in the morning astonished to see the early May dawn, the planet titling on its axis while she tried to control the formulae governing the epidemiology of infectious tropical diseases, how they etched themselves into her mind like hieroglyphs in her dreams.

  ‘I don’t know what I want to do,’ he said. ‘This country – I can’t see where I fit in here but I don’t want to leave.’

  ‘From what I can see your father owns this country, or some of it.’ She was startled by the instant anger in her voice.

  ‘You don’t know anything about this place.’

  ‘Maybe not. But I’ve stitched hundreds of people back together who are from this country and their blood is on my hands.’ She held them out in front of her body, for his inspection. ‘You’ll never see it, but it’s there.’

  She turned away. She no longer cared who Storm was, what he thought. She had regained herself. She felt momentarily free.

  ‘I don’t know what to say to you.’ He shot her another sideways look. ‘That’s why I don’t talk more. You’re older. You’re educated.’

  They turned onto a smaller road. Soon their headlights swept across a sign made of a solid slab of concrete: on this Reef Encounters was written in flowing blue letters that mimicked waves. They passed through the gate. A bass thump greeted them. In a small clearing to the back of the hotel a black helicopter squatted.

  The party was on the hotel’s front deck but spilled onto the beach. People stood in strips of magenta, pink, purple; a light deck was turned on the sand. The sea was invisible, lying somewhere beyond the illuminated struts of young people.

  Storm lunged ahead into the crowd without a word. She followed him as if blind, one arm reaching for the small of his back. Storm’s elbow was snagged by a thin, tanned girl, wearing a bikini under a transparent vest.

  She loitered for a while on the outskirts of their conversation. The girl swivelled towards her. She had a child’s nose and dark eyes rimmed in eyeliner. ‘What do you do?’

  Storm spoke before she could answer. ‘Rebecca’s a doctor. She was in the army.’ There was an impersonal, tribal edge in his voice, family pride perhaps. She’d never had such a sentiment mobilised on her behalf, not even from her mother.

  The crowd was thickening. The young men were tanned, with mops of unruly salt-stiffened hair. There was a uniformity to their faces, which were tanned, light-eyed, with the same static, rigid note she saw in Storm’s. The young women looked identical, sisters or cousins in an extended, prosperous family. They were all blond and their hair, while seemingly casual, flowing long and free, was on inspection surgically cut. They were beautiful in a lissome, easily ruined way, adorned with feather earrings and silver bangles they wore above their elbow, in imitation of the austere tribes people of the far north who guarded cattle wearing blood-coloured robes.

  There were few black faces in the crowd, apart from the barmen, the busboys and security staff. The DJ was playing trance. Boys pointed kaleidoscopic light lasers into the trees, illuminating the red eyes of frightened bush babies.

  She continued through the crowd, her eye on Storm’s back.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ She turned to find Evan beside her. ‘I’ll get you a beer, stay there. It’s mayhem at the bar.’

  A surge of people nudged her from behind. She inserted herself into Evan’s wake. As she followed him she was struck by a jolt of déjà vu. Each detail of the scene – Storm’s swathe through the crowd, Evan’s broad and muscular back, the pounding trance anthem on the sound system, the thin boy from London on the turntables, the tubes of plastic-covered fairy lights that entwined the anorexic figures of palm trees – she had lived before, so vividly she could have drawn it.

  Evan had reached the bar. Behind him she was shoved, hard, in the ribs by a knot of teenagers. She was unnerved, her heart raced. How could she get out of here? She could get a motorcycle taxi back to Kilindoni, even though that would take an hour, and riding pillion on the highway when the overnight juggernauts of buses were passing was a known way to die.

  The sea of young bodies parted. She felt a finger, or a hand on her elbow. She turned to find Storm beside her.

  A press, three people thick, blocked her way to the bar. The press of the crowd behind them intensified. Storm’s thigh pressed against her hip and something – his hand? – rested in the small of her back. They were
thudded from behind by bodies.

  His hand had fallen somewhere near hers. Without any awareness of what she was about to do, she reached for it. She took two of his fingers and encased them in hers.

  Her heart constricted. She turned her head to catch his eye, but he was staring ahead. She had made a mistake. If she released his fingers now she could claim she had been seized by anxiety, that she hadn’t thought about what she was doing.

  But an instant before she did this, he encircled her hand in his and held it. More bodies piled on them from behind. Pinioned in her position behind him, she could not see his face. His hand gripped hers until he had to reach for their drinks, and at last he released her.

  She left them and went to the wooden railing that overlooked the beach. She needed to gather herself. Her heart was still pounding.

  The tide was in; waves patrolled the concrete edge of the deck. Julia had told her that Bill’s father had built Reef Encounters in the 1950s, when the only tourists on this stretch of coast arrived with camping equipment. She tried to imagine it then, a strip of thick riparian forest, the shallow scoop of the bay speckled with local boats, no flat-bottomed snorkelling boats shuttling back and forth, no white-washed houses perched like giant egrets on the shallow rise above the ocean.

  Near the position she had taken up, three men stood in a row with beers in their hands, looking out to sea.

  She tried to look studied and serene, as if she had come only to stare at the ocean. One of the man-boys of the trio peeled himself away and approached her.

  ‘Enjoying the view?’

  ‘It’s one of the most impressive I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘It is.’ He nodded outward, as if saluting the sea. ‘Here from England?’

  ‘Yes, for a couple of months.’

  ‘That’s quite a while.’

  She struggled to make out the detail of his face in the darkening light. He was dark-haired with a receding hairline, a little stouter than the other men at the party, perhaps older, too. On the deck tables small electric candles had begun to appear.