The Dhow House

by Jean McNeil

  ‘I’m Rebecca.’

  ‘Tom.’

  Storm appeared, just as suddenly as he had vanished. He nodded at Tom. ‘This is my cousin, Rebecca.’

  ‘We’ve just met,’ Tom said.

  ‘Great.’ Storm departed. As he left, he cast her an uncertain glance. Tom must have caught it, because he raised his eyebrows to her.

  ‘So what do you think of the party?’

  ‘I think everyone knows each other except me.’

  ‘Yes.’ He gave her a rueful look. ‘That’s a pretty good description of things.’

  ‘I’m not great at parties in any case,’ she said. ‘I’m always asking people to repeat themselves. As soon as I arrive I start wondering how I’m going to get home. I suppose that means I’m old.’

  ‘Not old, just wise.’ Tom smiled. ‘I’m staying in Kilindoni. My folks’ house is there. I can drive you.’

  ‘No, really. I wouldn’t want to take you away from the party.’

  ‘I’m not up for staying much longer either. My dad’s not well. I said I’d be home by midnight.’

  On the way out they stopped at the table where Evan and Storm sat. She had to fight her way through bodies to reach them. ‘Tom is going to give me a lift home,’ she said.

  For a moment Storm looked confused. Then he looked at Tom. ‘Thanks, man.’ He put his hand on her forearm, angling her back towards Tom, as if handing her over. She surprised herself by wrenching her arm away from Storm’s touch. She saw Tom observe this as well.

  They walked to his car together, the sounds of the party drowned by distance, by the curled roar of the waves.

  ‘It’s good of you to drop me.’

  ‘Oh, don’t mention it. I was glad to get out. They’re always the same, these parties – same people, same conversations. Everyone knows that but there’s a ritualistic aspect to them that’s oddly comforting. I think that’s why everyone goes.’

  ‘Have you known Storm for long?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m a few years older than he is, so we’ve never been close. Plus I’ve spent a lot of time abroad.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I sail other people’s boats. I have my own, but I need to upgrade if I’m going to win any races, so in the meantime I skipper boats belonging to people with more money. A lot more money.’ He smiled in her direction, but his eyes did not seek out her face. ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I’m a doctor.’

  He whistled. ‘I didn’t expect that. No wonder Storm doesn’t know how to talk to you.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I could be wrong but I spend a lot of time in confined environments. Boats are good for getting to know people you know you won’t like much too quickly. They accelerate everything.’

  Tom’s speech pleased her. She felt relieved to merely hear such words: ritualistic, confined environments, accelerate. She felt as if she’d spent the last two weeks speaking a foreign language and had only now met someone who shared her mother tongue.

  ‘I don’t know how to talk to Storm either,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how to talk to any of these people.’

  Tom’s eyes were dark grey, she saw, open yet resigned to something she would not be able to identify.

  ‘This country is a bit like an island. You have to come from here to understand it. If you move here, no matter how many years you live here, I’m not sure you can get inside.’

  ‘Imports,’ she said. ‘A friend of mine used that term. It sounds like a word for breeding stock.’

  Tom laughed, but there was an uncomfortable slant in his voice. ‘It is, I suppose. Otherwise it becomes incestuous.’

  ‘How did these people make so much money?’

  ‘Oh, that happened long ago. Land, mostly. Farming. Most of the people there tonight are their grandchildren. Some of their families are in finance, or own safari companies. That’s probably the last cash cow left in this place, for a white person at least.’ A doubtful look flashed across his face. ‘Don’t get me wrong. There are some fascinating people in this country. I’m grateful for the upbringing I had here. My grandfather was the undersecretary for the PM, before independence. I have values. I’m not sure I’d be so certain of what I believed if I’d grown up in England.’

  ‘You’d have different values,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe. It’s difficult here, because no one with a white face will ever be in political power, ever again. It’s impossible to even get a job. So you have to be a self-starter, you have to make your own way. The president has decided he wants to make life difficult for the whites. He sees us as parasites.’ He laughed. ‘But everyone knows the parasites are elsewhere.’

  Parasites – a word she knew from Gariseb. It had suctioned itself to her, once.

  ‘People here seem so much more –’ she searched for the word – ‘vital. So much more themselves than in England.’

  ‘That’s because of what I’ve just mentioned. But also they don’t need to conform here. The social pressures are not entirely absent, but completely different.’

  She considered all this, lost in thought for a moment. ‘You speak very well,’ she said.

  ‘Ah, thanks.’ He flashed her a smile. ‘But that’s just my expensive education talking.’

  They slid through the gate of the house. She was grateful – for the ride, for his conversation, for any exchange that was not the painful, stop-start trade of misunderstandings she had with Storm.

  She flicked the car door open. ‘Thanks for the ride.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. Here –’ Tom fished in his pocket and pulled out a damp card – ‘this is my number. I’m not around for much longer, but give me a call if you find yourself at a loose end.’

  She lingered on the step until Tom’s headlights were extinguished by night, Tom’s phrase echoing in her mind. If you find yourself at a loose end.

  She turned to enter the house. The smell of frangipani was overpowering. The trees grew thick around the house with their dark, rubbery leaves. The grass rustled nearby and a hedgehog snuffled into view.

  Julia’s voice floated towards her from somewhere far inside the house. ‘Storm, is that you?’

  ‘No, Julia,’ she called back. ‘It’s only me.’

  The tide was out, exposing the reef. The ocean was striped with floating vats of seaweed. Between these were laid strips of light turquoise – sandbars. There, lionfish and blue-spotted rays darted in coral hollows.

  At Reef Encounters, four Muslim women occupied the oceanfront deck, sheathed in buibuis, sipping tea on a table littered with sunglasses and mobile phones.

  Margaux was late. Margaux was, she was beginning to realise, habitually late. Or perhaps no one took appointments seriously on the coast.

  Margaux sat down without apology. She wore her usual costume of a black bush hat, a black shirt, its top panel lacy and semi-transparent, and black trousers that stopped just below her knee. The Muslim women eyed them curiously from their table.

  ‘How’s it going up at the big house?’ Margaux asked.

  ‘It’s quiet. But then I suppose I wanted quiet.’

  They ordered gin and tonics. Normally she never drank in the day, but in her two weeks on the coast, alcohol had already become a habit. She couldn’t believe she made it through four months in Gariseb without a drink, apart from her contraband vodka.

  ‘This has to be a first. We’re the only white people here.’ Margaux’s eyes must have been roaming over the deck behind her sunglasses.

  ‘Is it that unusual?’

  ‘Reef Encounters is the colonial hangout, par excellence. I take a kind of masochistic pleasure in coming here and watching them.’

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘Stateless ex-colonials. There’s no other community like them anywhere, except maybe South Africa. I had plenty of time to observe them, growing up.’

  ‘You grew up here? You didn’t tell me that.’

  ‘Well, it’s not straightforward. I le
ft when I was twelve. My parents were missionaries, upcountry. The local whites always snubbed us. You were one of them or you weren’t – you went to the country club, you went to their dinner parties and their retirement galas and weddings on the beach – or you didn’t. There was no racial solidarity. It was all about class. Which wasn’t surprising, given they were mostly Brits.’

  ‘So it’s the British you disapprove of?’

  ‘They’re hardly British anymore. Their ancestors used this country as their personal playground and they haven’t developed much beyond that,’ Margaux’s mouth folded lean and tight over the word. ‘I mean, there’s an election coming up, thousands of people may be killed, Al-Nur is killing a hundred people a month in terrorist attacks, and these guys –’ Margaux gestured to the twirling trapezoids of parachute material and guy wires in the sky above the beach – ‘they’re kitesurfing.’

  ‘What would you have them do, join the army? They wouldn’t be allowed. They have the wrong colour skin.’

  ‘But doesn’t it strike you as dangerous? This is the leakiest border between terrorists and the Western world, and there’s a whole generation who’ve decided to hunker down in their mansions.’

  ‘They’re innocents.’

  ‘There is no such thing as innocence here.’

  ‘So they’re implicated, then?’

  ‘No, not at all. Not implicated, but not unaware either. These people are very smart. You don’t survive here for a hundred years unless you’re very shrewd. It’s not so much innocence as carelessness. Or thoughtlessness. Believe me, they know what is happening.’ Margaux sucked on her gin and tonic. ‘What amazes me is that they stay. They’ve stayed through an independence movement, a hostile immigration bureaucracy, restrictions on foreign exchange, election violence. And now terrorism, the real showstopper.’ She looked out to sea, her expression unreadable behind the sunglasses. ‘But with the exchange rate, if they went back to England, they’d hardly be able to buy a house in the home counties.’

  ‘I don’t think they see that as an option anyway. Even if their ancestors were English, they’re African now. That’s how they see it. ’

  She was surprised at the vehemence in her voice. Only a few weeks before she’d held the same opinion as Margaux. She’d thought, What are you all doing here, still?

  ‘That’s right, to an extent,’ Margaux said. ‘But really it’s because they won’t consent to be ordinary, to live ordinary lives. That’s what England means to them, a life like any other. They’re used to being the heroes of their own story, just because they are whites in a black country.’

  The same thought had occurred to her, but she hadn’t been able to articulate it as crisply as Margaux could.

  ‘Why does everyone stop talking when I mention my uncle’s name?’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘Just now, the manager here, he asked where I was staying. When I told him his manner towards me changed. He became more formal, somehow.’

  ‘There are so many rumours around this place,’ Margaux said. ‘Everyone says something different.’

  Over the last few days she had found herself poring over her uncle’s behaviour. He had not failed to be kind, solicitous, even chivalrous. When he looked at her there was real curiosity in his gaze. But also, she had to admit, suspicion, a thin icicle buried deep inside his being. In moments when he was unaware of being observed – getting out of his Land Cruiser, walking across the terrace facing the cliff, wielding gin and tonics before dinner – she saw in him a dark vitality, a speculative threat.

  ‘Look, I don’t know you well,’ Margaux said, ‘but how close are you to your family?’

  ‘Julia is my aunt, my mother was her sister. But they were never close. I only met Julia once that I remember.’

  ‘Your mother was her sister?’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Oh, how did she die?’ The usual strain of pity was absent from Margaux’s voice. Instead she heard the slightly clinical note she associated with people who were used to being surrounded by death – people of her tribe: doctors, nurses, soldiers.

  ‘A car accident.’

  ‘Did she die here?’

  ‘No, in England. My aunt came here and married, and much later I came to the border to work, that’s the only connection.’

  ‘But she didn’t marry just anybody. She married into one of the longest-established white families here.’

  ‘I didn’t know that. I didn’t know much about Africa, as it turns out.’

  ‘Well, this particular version of Africa.’

  ‘I know this sounds naïve, but I don’t understand how people make so much money here. Most people on the continent are so desperately poor.’

  She couldn’t see Margaux’s eyes, but she sensed a shift in her expression. ‘That is a naïve comment, for someone in your position.’ Margaux’s mouth twitched. It was as though she was considering, then discarding, words. ‘I mean, you’re a doctor. A worldly person.’

  ‘It’s not that I haven’t read the Economist, but I’ve never lived here,’ she said.

  ‘There are fortunes to be made off poor people,’ Margaux said. ‘And there are no rules here. Money makes the rules.’

  This was likely true, and one of the sources of her discomfort. She riffled through the facts in her mind, ordering them into cause and effect, as she had been taught to do: there was a possible insurrection developing, extremist attacks had taken place in the cities and towns of the coast. Foreigners were targeted, as much as locals. Elections were to take place in six weeks. The last time the country had an election over two hundred people had been killed in violence that the news termed ‘tribal’ but which was actually political. Yet in Julia’s house these topics never rose to the surface of dinner party conversation.

  The truth was she didn’t know what this place was really about. She would never fit into this enclave of white wealth. She passed through her days here giddy like a child, drunk on the novelty of her ignorance.

  ‘Tell me,’ Margaux said, ‘is that his real name, your cousin? Storm?’

  ‘His first name is Aidan. But he’s been called Storm since he was a baby.’

  ‘Well, I can hardly talk about heavy names. My mother named me after Margaux Hemingway. She thought she was pretty. And she was. But it’s quite a burden to carry around, a name from a family that has either shot, drunk or drugged itself to death.’

  ‘I love his books,’ she said. ‘They’re brutal, but they have such clarity.’

  ‘Everyone says that about brutality – that it’s clear. As if it were transparent, like gel hand wash, you need its astringency to keep the bacteria away. I think brutality is just brutal.’

  She felt a draining away inside her. She didn’t really know Margaux, and wasn’t sure if she liked her even, but she needed a guide, a chaperone, in this country. Normally she had the clarity, the natural scepticism, to perform this duty for herself. But the beauty of this place had disarmed her.

  They watched dhows bucking over through the mlango, the door – this was what everyone called the break in the reef. The sun disappeared around the headland. A column of cloud was advancing from the south-east. The doum, date and lala palms that guarded the coast seemed to anticipate the arrival of lashing winds, and shrank back.

  After sundown they parted. Margaux was heading to the backpacker bar she frequented on Frangipani Road. ‘You should come sometime,’ Margaux said. ‘They cultivate lovage and make nettle tea. It’s a blast.’

  She flagged down a matatu on Kilindoni main road outside the service station. Never take them, Julia had warned her. They’re driven by lunatics. They pack twenty people in. She had begun to defy her aunt’s warnings deliberately. The local whites treated any European or North American who came to live on the coast for any amount of time like children. The locals needed to peddle their knowledge of savagery and danger, she decided; it made them feel powerful, she supposed. Having eschewed the false safeties of Europe, the c
ountry’s whites had become resentful and suspicious of anyone who benefitted from them.

  She buzzed for the night guard to open the gate of the house. He appeared, a stark face beneath a Muslim prayer cap. It was six o’clock and he had been kneeling on a thin prayer mat on the side of the driveway with his shoulders flung east, towards Mecca. She kept her distance. She did not want him to smell the alcohol on her breath.

  A car materialised behind her. She turned around and saw Storm at the wheel. She waited for him at the entrance of the house, but when he got out of the car he was on his mobile. He did not look at her until he had finished his conversation – he never seemed to say goodbye, he just hung up.

  She opened the back door.

  ‘Three road blocks on the way up.’

  ‘Army?’

  ‘Militia.’

  ‘What did they want?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She was becoming impatient. ‘It’s your country.’

  Voices came from the open terrace. Fragments of words she could not quite catch flew towards her.

  As soon as they were through the door, her uncle’s eye snagged on her. ‘Rebecca, come and meet our guests.’ The word, guests, in her uncle’s mouth had a different sound. It sounded sacred, somehow.

  ‘Rebecca, please have a drink. Grace!’ her uncle shouted. They might have been drinking for some time.

  ‘This is Eugene,’ her uncle declared. She looked into a broad face. A man with a polo shirt stretched over a stomach so large it looked like he might give birth.

  ‘Where’s Storm?’ Bill asked.

  She turned around. ‘I don’t know. He was just here.’

  Her gaze was pulled beyond the open living room, east to the ocean and the moon lifting above the horizon. The cool light coloured the water pewter, a sunken, absorbed hue, united with the sky in an ancient wedding. That was it, she thought – this ocean looked old. It was settled, knowledgeable.

  ‘Rebecca…’