by Jean McNeil
She turned. Eugene was beaming at her. She saw him gathering his powers, like an singer taking in a lungful of breath.
‘How long have you been in our great country?’
‘Nearly six months.’ She named her position, the name of the organisation she worked for in the north. In Eugene’s face a rearrangement took place.
‘I see,’ Eugene said. ‘You are aiding the insurgency from the north.’
‘Humanitarian medical aid is non-partisan. We treat combatants and soldiers both,’ she said, using the terminology of the conflict.
‘This family continues to surprise me.’ Eugene shook his head. ‘All this talent. Why have we never met you or heard of you before? Julia?’ Eugene had regained his beam and now directed it at her aunt. ‘Where have you been hiding this child?’
‘She’s older than she looks,’ her aunt said, then smiled, to show she meant no harm.
She felt all the guests turn and regard her; the living room of the house was a stage and she a lead actress who had forgotten her line. Because she was in the spotlight she could not see the audience, only darkness.
What would this audience see? After having met her once they are confused as to her exact height, the colour of her hair. She gives an indistinct impression. But they remember her eyes, which are dark grey, the luminous graphite of paint on expensive cars, or crushed pencil lead. They notice she has fierce eyes but an approachable, capable manner, and wonder about this contradiction. They imagine she is easy – to manipulate, to convince. Some susceptibility, some minor flux within her sternness of mind, affords them this delusion. They are not entirely wrong.
They are surprised to find that such a small woman willingly hunkers down in the trench that separates life and death. They are intimidated by her integrity, her ambition. She is a serious person, having gone to the most serious of English universities as a hardship scholarship student; she learned there that life was similarly serious and lightweights didn’t count. She learned the ways of the wealthy, and their ruthlessness, specifically that there was a precision to be found in the pure exercise of the power of knowledge. She discovered she found this quality – of heartlessness, which she associated with clarity – attractive in other people. Ruthlessness and bad faith: she judged these qualities worse than cruelty, venal and subhuman, frightening, but sexually beguiling.
The power stuttered; behind her the guests sighed as one. Another coastal power cut. On days with heavy rain the power cut out almost immediately, extinguishing the floodlights that illuminated the terrace. The house had a generator, a small one capable of running the fridges and the lights, but Julia switched it on only if the power had been out for an hour or more; diesel was becoming scarce.
Swahili lanterns, lit by Grace at six thirty each evening, were placed around the pool in the grass. The darkness made the boom of the sea louder.
Storm appeared in the living room dressed in jeans and a white shirt. There was a necklace of leather and a piece of bone around his neck. All the young men, black and white, wore jewelry, she’d noticed: a beaded bracelet, an assortment of copper around it, sometimes a piece of leather or thin fabric tied to the wrist. These amulets jangled each time they moved.
‘Rebecca loves birds,’ Julia informed Eugene.
‘Really? Tell me something about birds I don’t know.’
‘To do that I’d have to know what you already know.’
‘Assume I know nothing.’
She realised then what the quality in Eugene’s face was, and which that had caught her attention – a veiled, watchful note she was familiar with, from the faces of Anthony, Stuart, the men she knew in her other, secret life.
‘The first bird you hear in the morning is the common bulbul,’ she said. ‘Then the red-capped robin-chat, which are parasitised by the red-chested cuckoo, which lays its eggs in their nests and the robin-chats find themselves rearing a monster chick. Sometimes this chick kills the legitimate chick, but the red-capped robin-chat keeps on feeding it nonetheless.’
Eugene shrugged. ‘The robin is not so intelligent then.’
‘The red-chested cuckoo has a beautiful call. It’s the bird that says, It will rain, it will rain.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Eugene said. ‘We have it in our garden in the capital.’
Her aunt rose and went to stand at the long teak dinner table. She called Grace, who appeared carrying a bowl of rocket, shaved parmesan and figs. The table smelled of the citronella candles her aunt set out to deter mosquitoes.
Her uncle and Eugene were now deep in conversation. ‘The Vilanculos development – I saw that on the VP’s agenda.’
‘Good.’ Eugene nodded vigorously. ‘We need to get that off the ground. They’re insisting on an environmental audit. UNESCO. The mangrove, Mac.’ – Mac was her uncle’s nickname here, she’d understood.
‘Well,’ her uncle shrugged.
‘I know, I know. It’s taken care of.’
They were beckoned to sit at the table. ‘You sit next to your cousin,’ Julia commanded her son.
Through the meal she felt the pressure of Storm’s gaze. She chose her moment when her aunt and uncle and Eugene were deep in conversation about the harbour development up the coast, and launched her eyes in his direction, half expecting to be wrong, to find that he was in fact staring at a gecko on the wall over her shoulder, or out into space.
‘I’m going to England.’
She gathered herself. ‘When?’
‘In September. Before the elections. It’s not safe here.’
‘Is that what Julia wants you to do?’
‘I don’t like England, but that’s where the opportunities are.’
‘What don’t you like about it?’
‘Too much indoor life, it’s all about making money.’
She said nothing. He had a point.
‘I’ll teach you to surf if you want.’
She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t even stand up on the board.’
‘Yes you can. Tomorrow.’ There was a determined note in his gaze.
The patter of rain began outside. With the electricity out, the moon was bright enough that she could see the steel seam of the oncoming clouds as they met the horizon out to sea. The rain began to drum on the satellite dish. It sounded like a steel drum in a Caribbean band. She heard the uncertain chatter of monkeys. In the trees beyond the house she could see their forms, huddled in the forks of branches.
The detail of his face pressed into her. It was stern, as if a larger force were being held in check. His bones were so close to the surface they looked like they might break the skin. But the weary loveliness of his eyes moved her; how he used them like a wall, casting her steel-hard glances. It was a face that knew it was being watched.
The sound of the monkeys came louder. They heard a bush baby screech.
He turned it upon her, now, the face that made her vital organs slide sideways in the cage of her body. His eyes had cooled to jade. He said, ‘They don’t like the rain.’
Three dhows sleek out of the inlet at the same moment she leaves the house at 5.30am, heading into silver breakers and a parchment sky. Dawn comes reluctantly at first, then catches fire. At 5.50 the muezzin begins to sing from the small green mosque across the inlet.
She is running through a substance denser than time and space. In her mouth the warm iron taste of need. Already she carries him with her everywhere she goes.
She is back at the house before seven. ‘Rebecca,’ her aunt’s voice, thin but insistent, calls her from somewhere in the house, beyond the outskirts of her thoughts, its distant, distracted note so like her mother’s voice. Perhaps it was her mother after all, calling her from outer space.
She stood at the bottom of the stairs, a black velvet dress dripping from her shoulders, eyelashes stiff with mascara. She had glimpsed her undressing for the bath. It was like spying on a minor movie star with an unidentified addiction: razor clam ribs, spine like a row of slim stones. Her legs were very mysterious. They wer
e flour-white, covered with nicks and the smoky smudges of bruises.
She had been left alone at night for weeks now, since she’d turned twelve. She was a reliable child. It didn’t occur to her to drink the bleach in the kitchen cupboard or set fire to the house.
She made fish fingers, watched television, did homework and searched her mother’s pockets and purse for evidence of where she’d gone. She found bus tickets, a Tube pass, chewing gum, lipstick, loose change. She could have asked the question, but it would be like asking a wild animal where they went at night to find, kill and devour small creatures.
Her mother always came home alone. ‘I’m going to bed,’ she said, from behind her night-time mask. It was seven in the morning. ‘Your porridge is on the stove.’
Her mother was willowy, saved from being thin by her modest curves around her waist and breasts. Her blonde hair darkened with the winter. She never came to parents’ meetings at school, or to the school play or concert band performances. She never took her to Crystal Palace or the zoo or the Science Museum and they never went on holidays. She worked long hours at famous magazines alongside other women whose perfume was worn so liberally her mother returned home with a confused tang wafting from her.
She went to school, she came back. The sky was the colour of mud. Her mother drank a bottle of wine every day. Even so she was not quite drunk. She was not quite a drunk.
There were no photographs of family on the walls, and when the phone rang it was about a delivery or a wrong number. You must have the wrong number. She learned to say this phrase convincingly by the time she was five years old. When school let out and other children went to grandparents’ homes or to a beach in Spain she remained in London, climbing through ghostly playgrounds, orbiting parks where she would look longingly at dogs her mother told her they could not afford.
Don’t you have any friends? her mother said.
I don’t want friends.
Friends are the only thing in this world that will save you. Without friends you will never get ahead, no matter how well educated you are.
She lay on her bed later, turning over her mother’s parable. Her mother never gave her advice or proffered truths. She spoke in a series of warnings. She would have to get a job because she had no friends; she had no family, so she needed friends. Would a job protect her from having friends, or would it be a way to acquire them?
Her mother had always been there, yet she was poised for the moment when she would leave. In her room she hoarded thirty pounds, plasters, a container of water she kept forgetting to refill and which gathered dust on its meniscus (a word she had learned in science class and instantly loved), a telephone calling card, her birth certificate and a stuffed donkey who would accompany her when the day came and she was forced to set out on the road to – where? – because her mother had not come home that morning, her mother had gone to a tent in Devon to learn the spiritual ways of the Sioux Indians, her mother had made an unwise choice among the reedy men lined up on pub barstools that night, her mother had gone to a Buddhist retreat in Snowdonia, her mother had been knocked down by a bus.
Children always knew if their parents were on their side, she came to understand. They could be wayward and bizarre parents, but still you knew if you were safe or not. That even very young children could tell a reliable from an unreliable parent was down to survival instinct, she supposed.
The year she turned twelve she became fascinated by ghosts. She was anticipating something. Death seemed very near to her. She was convinced she could die quite soon. Her childhood was one of serial obsessions – horses, nuclear war, Arabia, feral children, poker – which came and went with the seasons. She knew these were not common obsessions for a twelve-year-old, and she kept them to herself, as much as is possible for the truly obsessed. Life was a forest of secrets, she was beginning to realise, a densely woven wood to which there were no maps. In her mother’s life there was always a whiff of impropriety, a doubt about her integrity. She lived as if in a cloud.
She was nineteen the year of the accident. She remembers waiting – waiting for her mother to come home, waiting for normal life to resume, for the blare of uncertainty that had suddenly filled her lungs to disperse. Neither of them had mobile phones. Hardly anyone did – tradesmen, celebrities, yes. It was a different world then, a world of waiting.
The sound of the café where she went to calm her nerves grew to a roar in her ears. It was a Portuguese café; there were many in their area. She waited and studied the moon crater patterns on the burnt sugar surface of the yellow pastry she bought but would never eat.
It was evening when the police rang. She remembers trying to get hold of Julia – an international telephone call to what must have been Bill’s office. She can’t remember who she spoke to, only that the woman, a secretary perhaps, had said, She’s computing in the hoarse trils. Pardon? she’d said, over and over. It’s her niece, her sister has died, you must tell her. I can’t, I can’t, the woman said in the truncated, tripping accent, her voice fading on the line. The hearse trils!
Julia was competing in horse, or hearse, or hoarse, trials in the country club in Hatton. She has been there now, seen its immaculate polo field, the grass kept clipped by a resident herd of Thomson’s gazelles, set in the shadow of the dormant volcano. That was where Julia was on the day her mother’s broken body was vaporised in a crematorium in Streatham. Julia, soaring over fences, through artificial ditches, the thump thump of her horse’s hooves, the equatorial sun a knife through her head, hair shimmering from underneath her black riding helmet. At the crematorium they were ushered to the small chapel: Rebecca and three of her mother’s colleagues from the magazine were the only mourners. One of the pallbearers, if that’s what they were, saw her stricken face and gave her a friendly wink. Sometimes we get none at all, love.
Six months after the funeral she was in a lecture theatre, organic chemistry organograms on the PowerPoint screen, a thin professor pointing at them with a red laser.
At university she lived among cadavers of small animals and full-sized human beings, skinless anatomy models, drawings and graphs of the interiors of bodies, and found this was the territory she had hoped to discover when the surface had been peeled away. Life was an elaborate stage set. If you pulled aside the curtain or unplugged the light the inner truth would stand exposed, sudden and vital, a creature that was no more than an amalgam of flesh and ghost. When she became a doctor she would move, all-powerful, the healer, stalking this corridor of chance that separated the living from the dead.
‘Don’t look down. Look at the sky, get a fix on the horizon.’
To the south black clouds were amassing. The sea was choppy but warm. Clumps of seaweed, coconut husks and swollen protea-like flowers floated in water the colour of gooseberries. On the sandbar matted shoals of small fish swirled.
She managed to get her feet onto the board, but her knees locked when she tried to straighten them.
In the water Storm’s hands were the pale lime of fever trees. Their reflections coalesced and fractured on the surface of the water. She was becoming thin and brown.
She looked down into his frown. He stood in chest-deep water, spotting her, hands outstretched.
‘Just stand up.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Yes you can. Just go out there, paddle. Sit down if you don’t want to stand. Come on.’
‘I haven’t been doing this since I was three like you have.’
‘Concentrate. I’ll swim out with you.’ He let go of her and powered through the water.
She followed him out beyond the breakers. He raised his head.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Go.’
She stood. For the first few seconds, she thought she would fall. Then from somewhere inside her body she found her balance. It moved through her, a gold current. The wave shoved her forward with surprising force.
She looked out to sea. A shape cohered. She hadn’t seen it from the water.
‘Wh
at’s that?’
‘What?’ Storm squinted.
‘It looks like a ship.’
‘Oh that, something’s wrong with it. Lost an engine. It needs to be towed back to Gao.’
‘It’s from Gao? What’s it doing here?’
‘There’s a lot of shipping between Gao and Bahari ya Manda.’
‘Even with the war?’
He shrugged.
She turned back to stare at the ship. It was still against the horizon. A freighter, from its bulbous bow, low-slung waist, anchored in deep water.
‘How long has it been there?’
‘About a week. Nobody knows for sure. They’ve taken to calling it the ghost ship. At night people come ashore. They’ve got a speedboat.’
‘Why do they come ashore?’
‘To get supplies. What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing,’ she said.
‘Let’s go in. We’d better get home.’
She remained standing all the way to the shore. He swam beside the board. When they reached shallow water she crouched down and slid off; she misjudged her trajectory and splashed into him.
‘Sorry,’ she breathed. She felt light-headed from the heat of the day and from spending so much time in the water. ‘I’m not used to the ocean.’
‘Come on, let’s go. We’ve got just enough time to get home before the tide comes in.’
She watched him wade through the shallows towards the beach. He is just an ordinary kid. The voice again, the one which had first spoken to her only a few days ago. It sounded uncannily like Julia’s, or her mother’s, even. He doesn’t want to conquer the world. He just wants to live in the country where he was born. But he’s not wanted here.
She was beginning to understand the nature of his dilemma, of all the whites who came from here. She hadn’t taken it seriously, until now. She silently addressed his pale, gleaming back. So what do you want?
He might have perceived her thoughts. He made to turn around. She darted her eyes away, looking down along the beach, where slim, pale people in bikinis and kikois were ambling on the shoreline.