by Jean McNeil
‘Come on, Rebecca,’ Storm said. She heard it for the first time, the snare in his voice. ‘It’s time to go home.’
She walked out of the sea and onto the beach behind him.
When they arrived back at the house, Julia was not there. Storm went outside to speak to the gardener. She stuck her head in the fridge on her way to her room. Three flavours of yoghurt were lined up on its shelves: passionfruit, vanilla, strawberry. In Gariseb she had dreamed of yoghurt, any kind.
She sat in her room, spooning her way through a vanilla yoghurt. This would be her dinner. It didn’t matter; the heat took away her appetite.
A gust of loneliness passed through her. She could have sought out Storm’s company, she supposed, but she was wary of overstaying her welcome. They had spent the entire afternoon together after all.
There could be no purpose to her staying for the two months. She’d have to call Anthony and tell him it was time for her to go back to Gariseb, or home. Wherever that might be. Her flat in Vauxhall with its tangle of high-rise luxury flats-in-progress and Victorian railway arches, perhaps. It appeared in her memory as an abstract space. She tried to imagine herself moving around it, from her open-plan kitchen with its white Magnet cupboards to the living room, its flat-screen television, the plant-less cherry wood plain of her floor. She could never keep houseplants; her work took her away for too long.
Should she tell Anthony about the ship? It could hardly be a secret. If she told him, he might suggest she stay. But she didn’t want to be here at all. This was the fact she had been hiding from herself, these past three weeks. She would rather have had a summer in London, of debriefs, psychiatrists, of shuttling between her flat and Anthony’s office only a kilometre away until they let her go, at first gently, then, when they had no further use for her, they would stop answering her coded texts.
The past three weeks had been unlike any other weeks of her life. She had lived them in slow motion, so that it might as well have been three months, or years. Something had changed within her, shifting her away from her usual balance, the assembly point inside her around which all energies rotated. She didn’t know what it was. Only that it had been a kind of previous self, the Rebecca who, on her return trip to the embassy in the capital, where she had expected to be for only two days before returning to London, sat at a computer, Anthony looming over her shoulder, all but dictating her email to Julia, tentatively entitled, hello. Who dictated an explanation of why she had not been in touch before, her early granting of leave, her intention, always, to have looked them up. I don’t need to stay for long. But she did, as it turned out. Two weeks became two months. I can stay at a hotel for a while, she’d written, if that’s too long.
Julia had responded warmly – with more warmth on email than she showed in person, curiously. We have a big house, you’re welcome to stay as long as you like. We are down at the coast for the winter. Anthony had been pleased. And she found she was pleased too, for unanticipated reasons: she was relieved to have somewhere to recuperate, to finally have a chance to meet her mother’s sister properly. In those days in the capital, for the first time in a very long time she felt optimistic. Anthony must have seen this and wondered about this woman who was neither old nor young, who was able to rescue herself from one disaster and walk so sanguinely into another.
As she read Julia’s email in Anthony’s office she formed a vision: she saw herself taken into the bosom of the family; invited to dinners, to barbecues and parties, she saw herself not having to make decisions or choices about who she would be with and what she would do. All this had happened. It was not as if she had been excluded. She did not expect to be known or understood, or even accepted. Possibly she had hoped to be tolerated, and that some in the family might display some curiosity about her. As for Anthony, he would get what he wanted, but she did not see this as a betrayal, or not exactly. She was owed something. By him, by the universe, possibly, after what had happened.
But the family was not yet complete. She heard the name more and more now that her arrival was imminent. Lucy was five years older than Storm, she was a woman, might she provide some companionship? Her name rang through the house now in Julia’s insistent chime. Lucy.
Lucy arrived in a blaze of bougainvillea. The rains made the garden glisten in green and gold. The palms leaped towards the sky and flowers exploded along the low coral wall that separated the house from the garden.
The purr of her uncle’s Land Cruiser subsided. She heard a crunch in the driveway, doors opening and shutting, then the drum roll of a wheeled suitcase.
‘Rebecca…’ Julia’s voice rang through the house, that strident tone she used when welcoming guests. ‘She’s here.’
The live version of her cousin was identical to the photographic one. Lucy was small and dark-haired. She looked like Bill; she could see nothing of Julia’s blondness, her elastic heiress quality. Lucy had something of Storm’s severe cast of eyes and mouth, but her eyes were of a much darker blue, so deep they looked black. A pair of skinny jeans clung to a wiry body, a purple shirt billowed over a waspish waist. Lucy’s feet were tiny, almost child size. She wore green nail polish on her toes, but her fingers were bare. Lucy was twenty-eight, is that what Julia had said? The sprite girl who stood in front of her could pass for eighteen.
Lucy put down her bags and surveyed the house. ‘It looks good, Mum.’ Lucy turned and smiled in her direction. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’ She said this with warmth.
She took her cousin’s hand. ‘Me too,’ she said.
Julia drifted through the kitchen. She was already changed by the arrival of her daughter, like a garden suddenly surged into season.
Storm came down the stairs. He embraced his sister. She was enfolded, her face pressed into his chest.
She felt like an intruder. She would go for a walk on the beach. She had enough time, according to the tide tables.
She headed down the garden stairs. She stayed there, her eyes focused on the top branches of the mbambakofi tree, where she heard the trill of sunbirds.
He was beside her before she heard him.
‘Where’s Lucy?’ she asked.
‘She’s gone to bed. She didn’t sleep at all on the plane. She always watches films, one after the other. Where are you going?’
‘For a walk on the beach. To give you a some space.’
He gave her an unusually tolerant look. He reached out and snagged her elbow very gently. ‘Listen. Scarlet-chested,’ he said.
‘I can’t see them.’
‘I can tell by the call.’
The sunbirds kept up their rapid lilt. They threaded in and out of the tree. From time to time she caught iridescent flashes within the cobalt weave of shadows. They looked like Victorian Christmas baubles, blue-brown glazed glass, then the slash of scarlet next to viridian, then dark amethyst.
‘Do you want to come for a drive?’
‘Now? Where?’
‘I have to go up to Moholo to do some banking and pick up a few things. I thought – since you wanted to get out of the house.’ He gave her a defiant look, as if willing her to refuse.
‘Fine,’ she said. She didn’t know if she wanted to go with him or not. She felt her will evaporate once more in his company, as if she’d never had a will at all.
The heat cut through them as they got in the car. He revved the engine and they skidded backwards.
They drove north under a tiger sky; streaks of red-brown stretched from the sky to the sea. ‘Sandstorms,’ Storm said. ‘Heading down the coast.’
‘Where is the sand from?’
‘North, the desert. It’s not far.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I feel it. It’s like it’s pulling me towards it.’
‘We used to go on holiday to Gao when I was a kid. Dad had business there. He owned a hotel, the Costa. Everyone stayed there, before the war. Now it’s just a ruin. I liked Gao. Everything was pristine, undisturbed. People were pure Arabs. It was like stepping bac
k in time.’
Storm spoke in a series of fragments, always. He didn’t like to tell stories, she had noticed. It was as if he had lived a history-less life. So when he offered a nugget of past it was as if he were entrusting a treasure to her.
She closed her eyes. His profile carved itself on the inner shade of her eyelids.
‘What are you thinking?’
She opened her eyes. ‘About Gao. How now its name sends shivers down everyone’s spine. Didn’t you feel afraid there?’
‘It wasn’t like that then. It was a city of camels and qat and dates and Italian newspapers. A real Arab culture. The men sat out in the streets at night drinking tea. The women were allowed to come and go unchaperoned then. There’s nowhere like it anymore.’
‘No,’ she said, as they flashed past women wearing khangas carrying yellow water containers on their heads, past shambas and their floppy maize. Horned cows grazed in the gullies on the side of the highway. ‘That’s long gone.’
‘You don’t like us.’
She darted him a look. She was so shocked by this statement she couldn’t think what to say. ‘It’s not about liking.’
‘You’re bored here.’
‘Not bored. Restless. I’m used to…’ She shook her head.
‘To what?’
‘I don’t know even where to start.’
‘Tell me about a typical day, when you’re at work.’
‘Alright. I wake at five thirty. The earlier I get up the better the Internet is; we have one satellite connection for a staff of twenty. I look at my email, read the charts of the patients on my rounds, try to get information on the conditions and diagnoses I’m not certain about or familiar with.’ She drew in a breath. ‘The first thing I do is see who died in the night. Or if someone’s amputation has suppurated, if there has been any sepsis. The patients who are critical are kept in a separate tent, and I start there. We get incoming casualties, mortar fire, border skirmishes. Usually this happens after seven in the morning. By then there has been enough light for an hour for either side to start killing people.’
She glanced at him to see if he was still listening. He stared straight ahead, his gaze intent on the road.
She had left out certain details – bile, pus, sodden bandages left in the corner and which somehow retained the shape of the limbs they had been attached to, how they lolled like sinister dolls, their appendages at impossible angles. Women who refused to be cut out of their chadors or burqas, girls whose headscarves were wound around their necks like a constrictor. She catalogued the abrasions on their vaginas, the bruises turned black under blood flow loss; how labia would sometimes twitch to life in the throes of rigor mortis.
‘You stopped.’
‘I know.’
‘What are you thinking?’
‘I’m thinking that – to me everything I’ve just been talking about is my life, and all this –’ she cast her arm out the window as they passed by the heliotropic signs for hotels, sun, sea, sun, sea – ‘is just… I don’t know what it is.’
‘It’s a resort. People come here to have fun. Don’t you ever relax?’
You became a doctor so you could avoid the reality of life, not to confront it. Alexander the pilot had said this, how many years ago now? The statement had marked the moment he had stopped admiring her, or more importantly, stopped believing in her.
‘Maybe I don’t. I can’t take much leisure. I need to be put to use. What is the point of good times if you only ever have this, if there’s no struggle and sacrifice to set the good times against?’
His lips were pursed. It might never have occurred to him that there was any quarrel with the life he led, that any other life was possible.
‘I like having you here.’
She was so surprised she laughed out loud.
His look was one of affront. ‘Why are you laughing?’
‘Because I thought you were going to say the opposite.’
‘No, I really do.’
‘You’ve got a strange way of showing it.’
He glanced out the window. ‘It’s almost as if you were necessary.’
At this she felt – elated. Then instantly burdened.
They had slowed, then stopped, to let a herd of handsome cattle cross the road. In the rear-view mirror she watched as a truck approached. Surely it would slow down now. No, now.
She had time to glance at Storm, to see his alarm.
Then her own voice, strangled, screeched, then tyres on asphalt.
The world receded, as if raked on a giant tide, and darkness soaked her mind.
Lucky, so lucky.
The words swam towards her. She saw a metal trolley. She was in a supermarket. They had gone shopping, how could she have forgotten?
Then she remembered and in the same moment was on her feet. A dark-skinned man in a thin white coat stood beside her.
‘You are very lucky. You must lie down again. I am amazed you can even stand.’ A gentle hand pushed her down. An emphatic, elderly voice. Indian accent. All the doctors on the coast were Indians, she had heard.
‘Where am I?’
‘Bahari ya Manda. At the clinic,’ the voice said.
‘What happened?’
‘You had an accident but you are fine. Both of you.’
She remembered she was not alone.
‘Where is Storm?’ A dull thud in her chest – her heart, staggering. A pain in her left leg, a throb in a cheekbone. They had been wearing seatbelts. She remembered the thrust from behind, her head pushed back with the force.
She saw a window and another hospital bed. He lay there, perfect, as if he had just taken a nap. The rest of the image emerged. She remembered the truck filling the mirror.
‘Give me your stethoscope.’ She tried to prise it out of the man’s hands. When she resisted she said, ‘I’m a doctor.’ She got down from her bed and moved towards Storm.
‘There was a bomb in town this afternoon.’
‘A what?’
‘That is why there are no other doctors,’ the man said. ‘A bomb at the bank. Ten people dead, forty injured.’
The information slid over her brain.
She looked at Storm, prostrate on the bed beside her. His hair looked unusually dark and matted with sweat. Other than that, he seemed unscathed.
Suddenly he sat up. Then immediately slumped forward. ‘Dad—’
‘You’re fine.’ She took his face in her hands and before she had time to think, pressed her lips to his. A slight response, a muted electricity, pulsed into her. She let go.
‘He is your brother, yes?’
‘Yes, he is my brother.’
The doctor might think, this is what you do when you realise your brother is still alive – you kiss him.
‘How can we get home?’
‘You can call your family,’ he said. ‘Use my phone.’
‘Where are our phones?’
‘I don’t know. Some people came to the car.’ Their phones had been stolen, even while they sat in shock, slumped at the steering wheel.
‘Where is the car?’
‘By the side of the road where you had the accident. I would get an ambulance to take you home, but with the bomb I am on standby.’
The muezzin’s call to prayer filled the air. She saw a window with a crack in it. On the opposite side of the street, used bicycles lined up in three rows. A white structure with lantern-shaped windows, green-and-yellow stained glass. An unceasing buzz of tuk-tuk taxis with plates on their fronts announcing their names: Ptolemy, Julius. On their backsides was another plate with their slogan of choice. You’ll never walk alone. A man walked down the street carrying a box of avocadoes. He passed another man selling bags of rice from a stall made of planks balanced on old gas canisters. On the corner was a pile of old televisions, and the sad clump of a mule, his hair pitted and blackened.
All this pressed on her.
Bill sent a driver to fetch them. He was waiting for them at the house. She
would never forget the look on his face when he saw his son. He gave her a single searching glance before panic flooded his eyes as Storm emerged from the car.
‘You’re alive,’ Bill addressed her.
‘We’re a bit bruised, that’s all. We need to rest.’ She heard an unfamiliar conciliatory tone in Storm’s voice. ‘Where’s Lucy?’ he asked.
‘She’s at Tasha’s,’ Julia said. ‘We called her but she didn’t pick up.’
‘Like I said, we’re fine.’
‘It could easily have been otherwise.’ The tone in Bill’s voice held them. She saw Storm’s neck stiffen. Her uncle’s face had collapsed into a dark mask. ‘But thank God you’re okay.’ A viscous energy seemed to radiate from her uncle. Bill was standing, Julia sat on the baraza. She found it odd Julia did not get to her feet and embrace her son. Julia looked outwardly composed, but on closer inspection something was slumped inside her.
‘Don’t worry, really,’ she heard Storm say. ‘We’ll be down for dinner.’ She felt Storm’s hand on her elbow. ‘Let’s go upstairs. We’ll take the back steps.’
‘What’s happening? What’s wrong?’
He would not meet her eye. ‘They’re discussing something important.’
‘I can see that. About our accident, the car?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’
There was a narrow white staircase at the back of the house. It was for the house’s staff, and also served as a makeshift fire exit. Her aunt had shown it to her once; it led to a passageway at the back of Storm’s room. They walked along the passageway of the second floor, skirting the edge as if it were the sea cliff. They could hear his father’s voice emanating from downstairs. She could not make out what he was saying. At the door to his room, Storm steered her inside. He closed the door behind them.
‘I’ll show you some photos.’ His voice harboured a new, calming note.
They sat on his bed. It was low, inches from the ground and faced the window. Through it doum palms rustled in the breeze.
He spread his laptop across his knees. A series of images unfolded: a door handle, round, wrought iron, against a darkened door, slats in the shape of stars and diamonds carved through the wood. A rope slung across the prow of a faded dhow, the teak painted purple once, now faded to the colour of rose wine. An Arab lamp, tall and slim, like the one next to his bed.