by Jean McNeil
‘Did you take these?’
‘At Bahari ya Manda, a year ago. Close to where we were today, the clinic, in the old Arab quarter.’
She stared at the images. The day appeared to her as pieces of a vexing puzzle. Lucy’s arrival, the sunbirds, their departure, the clinic, Bill’s mood, and now sitting next to each other on his bed, looking at photographs. She wondered if he remembered her kiss. She didn’t know why she had decided to do it. If he had asked her why, she would be unable to say.
She forced her attention back to the images. ‘You have an eye for detail. You seem to be drawn towards Arab culture.’
‘I am,’ he said. ‘I like it visually, the patterns and the filigrees, the kanzus and the buibuis. I like how people hide themselves. It seems restrained and elegant. Even the language is like that. You speak Arabic, don’t you?’
‘Not that well, but enough.’
He nodded. ‘Mum sometimes says I would have been an Arab in another life. A dhow captain, maybe.’
Her leg pressed against his. She did not try to move it away, although this would have been the correct thing to do. Her body hummed with an unfamiliar current, calm and excited at once. Perhaps this was what it felt like, to be part of a family.
From downstairs came a sudden scrape of chairs.
‘I think they’re going out,’ he said. Then, sure enough, they heard the start of a car’s motor, a rev, the crunch of gravel underneath wheels.
She pulled her leg away and felt a tear within her, as if she were leaving her own flesh behind. She stood. ‘Are they angry at us for having an accident?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s better you don’t know.’
‘Why?’
‘You’re going to have to trust me, at some point.’
‘I do trust you,’ she said.
‘It’s something to do with getting their money out of the country. Before that becomes impossible.’
‘Why do they want to do that?’
‘They don’t trust the banks here anymore. They’re worried about the elections, about what will happen on the coast if the Islamic movement gains ground here.’
‘But they won’t leave?’
He looked troubled. ‘I used to think they’d only leave the country at gunpoint. That’s happened before, but not here. Not to people like them.’
‘What do you mean, people like them?’
He gave her a strange, mistrustful look. He closed his laptop. It was her cue to leave.
She went to her room and lay down. The events of the day troubled her. She had been cast out of her own existence. This was what accidents, injury, trauma did to people, she knew; it dislocated them from a continuous narrative, like a bridge that has been washed away, or a plane which suddenly loses altitude and plummets through the sky. She was still falling.
Alone in her room she heard a distant door shut, then open. The house’s sounds were as familiar to her now as if it were her own.
Later – she would never be sure how much time had passed – she jolted awake, her eyes peering into the darkness. She had been woken by the muezzin’s bellow from the Kilindoni mosque, the midnight-to-sunrise prayer was early. The clock said 3.50am.
The mosque turned up the volume. She put her hands over her ears and lay wide-eyed in the dark. She had once liked the sound of the predawn Adhan, had found it comforting, even. Now it sparked alarm. After an hour she lost patience. She got up and went downstairs.
Halfway down she had heard a sound she could not immediately place, half rasp, half hiss. Her mind was ready to continue but her body stopped dead.
She saw a movement more as a suggestion than a form. Something was coiled around the lamp next to Julia’s pristine white sofa. Slowly, her breath held in her lungs, she backed up the stairs.
At the top step, she turned and looked behind her. What she would have done if the ribbon had followed her up the step, she didn’t know.
She found herself walking down the corridor. She pushed open the door to Storm’s room. He lay sprawled on the bed, his arms thrown out on either side of him.
‘Storm.’
He shifted but did not wake. She put her hand on his shoulder and shook it. A single eye opened.
‘There’s a snake in the living room. I think it might be a green mamba.’ She added, uselessly, ‘I don’t know what to do.’
He was on his feet in a single movement that was so swift and compact she jumped back. He went to his closet and emerged carrying a spear-like instrument with two oval shapes on the end of it.
‘I’ll handle it. I’ve done it before. Just stay at the top of the stairs until I tell you to come down.’
‘Shouldn’t we wake Julia and Bill?’
‘They’re out. They’ve stayed at friends. The curfew.’
Only then did she notice he was naked. He seemed to notice his nakedness in the same moment, because he leaned the tongs against his wardrobe and leaped into a pair of shorts.
She followed him down the corridor. From behind he looked like one of the illegal fishermen she saw on the road and beach during her runs, with their trident spurs for spearing octopus and lobster.
She waited at the top of the stairs until she could not see him anymore. ‘Is it there?’ she hissed.
‘You don’t need to whisper. Snakes are deaf.’
‘But is it there?’
She moved two steps down. His back gleamed in the moonlight. He held the spear with the tongs out in front of him; she could make out the body of the snake swaying back and forth, its head clamped in the body of the instrument. He held the captured snake out in front of him, then walked beyond the house and disappeared around the corner.
When he returned the tongs were empty.
‘What did you do with it?’
‘I let it go. It’s not a good idea to kill a snake.’
‘Why?’
‘I was taught that if you kill a snake needlessly then all snakes will know, and they’ll make you pay. You’re much more likely to be killed by one then. It’s a kind of curse.’
‘Who taught you that?’
‘Dad. But everyone here knows that. This is a wild country.’
Afterwards they found they could not sleep. They sat on the sofa, posted at either end, legs tucked underneath them. The lamp that the snake had wrapped itself around was at her elbow.
‘I was going to come and sit right here.’
‘Why were you up, anyway?’
‘Bad dream.’
‘What about?’
‘About making mistakes. I’m operating and it goes wrong. I puncture an artery by mistake, and blood spurts onto my face. I’m operating and I can’t find my instruments. The nurse is wearing a balaclava and holds a gun to my head.’
She looked at him, half expecting to see his usual stony middle-distance stare.
He was regarding her watchfully. There might even have been a grain of fear in his gaze, as if he weren’t sure what she would do next.
‘You seem like you’ve always known the right thing to do,’ he said.
‘I’m trained not to have doubts.’
They both looked out beyond the house, to where the sea was pouring into the world. The lip of the sky was lit with amber.
‘Today will be cloudy,’ he said.
‘How do you know?’
‘There are patterns in the Kusi. If you can see the sunrise then the day turns cloudy.’
‘What is the Kaskazi like?’
‘It’s so much calmer. The mornings are overcast but at noon the wind chases the cloud away. The afternoons are windy and hot.’
He described the high cloud of the summer monsoon, an altostratus of a light grey pearl, he said. The Kaskazi brought still conditions at sea because the wind came from the north and the currents from the south. This created an opposing force, calming the waves. She tried to imagine days without the cathedral clouds of the Kusi, the olive light they gathered at sunrise and sunset.
He told her about th
e heat at Christmastime, when even in the depths of night the temperature never dropped below 25 degrees, about the ghost crabs which invaded the house, tap-dancing sideways across the cool cement of the living room floor. The mornings were cloudy, but by noon the wind blew the clouds away. The ocean was warm and free of the seaweed that latticed it in the Kusi. Then, everyone sat out late at night under the watchful eye of Orion and the Pleiades, which careened high in the sky.
As he spoke, she felt a rendering inside her. An entity was separating from its creator, like a space capsule departing from the mother ship. The same sensation had come to her in the car, before their accident. She was listening to him speak from the passenger seat when she felt a peeling off, a release. One part of her held a sensible conversation, heard him use pleasingly precise terms like altostratus. The other part was stunned into a sullen fear she had never felt before. Fear of what? She tried to catch it, put a name to it, but it slipped from her hands. She knew a fissure had been carved through her, a deep cut only he might be able to cure. But he did not seem the curing kind.
‘Let’s go back to bed.’
She let him walk past her, brushing her arm as he did, and absorbed the familiar bolt of electricity strung between them as taut as any power wire. She followed him up the staircase, past her own door, down the hallway towards her aunt and uncle’s unoccupied room, past the louvred windows with the shutters drawn against the night wind. She walked for what felt like hours, her life falling away behind her. Her heart pounded even while tiredness lapped at the edges of her body, spreading a paralysis within her. He passed through the door to his room, which yielded to his touch, floating open. She pulled the door shut behind them.
She will have to forget what happens next, before remembering it.
She will not remember how she got from the door to the bed. She will not remember whether he said anything, if he told her to leave, but she will remember the look on his face as he turned to find her in the room with him, that it was not gratification or acceptance, but a look of reckoning. Of manoeuvre, even.
She will remember that her mouth was suctioning his. There was no transition, no moment before this happened. It suddenly was. She struggled to grasp the present tense. There was no more present, only an amalgam of past, present, future. In this nameless dimension – more than in his flesh – she lost herself.
She will remember that she has never kissed anyone like this before. It is like starting life again, in reverse, going from old to new. Her mouth no longer has anything to do with breathing or hunger.
They were still sore from the accident, she will remember – both bruised where the seatbelt had pulled taut against them. She might even have cracked a rib, because when his ribcage pressed on hers she cried out.
She will remember digging her fingers in his scalp. She will remember wanting to devour him, everything that made him. She will remember thinking, and yet it being not her thought but an old code that emerged from a deep vault inside her: I want to be with you. But she was with him. Where was this yearning for what she had underneath her hands coming from? It frightened her to need so desperately what she already possessed.
Thought deserted her. She descended into a black vacuum. The tension on his face was not like any other expression she had seen – not desire but a kind of hate, a stunned ferocity. They kept their eyes open and on each other every minute. She could not remember being so afraid.
She will remember biting his shoulder hard enough to leave a tooth-shaped brown bruise that he would cover in the following days, when he was careful to wear a T-shirt in the house. She will remember he held her down, he blocked her breathing for a minute, his hand pressed on her windpipe and she began to rasp. Only then did he let go.
She will remember that for the first time since she had come to the coast she could not hear the roar of the sea. Another sound took its place inside her ears, her mind, in the echoing chambers of the damp cathedral of her heart.
A violent rearrangement took place inside her, as if her organs were being shuffled. Kidney replaced heart, heart replaced brain. She wondered if the taste of blue metal in her mouth was blood. She liked his smell. It was familiar to her. They were kin, she could smell it on his skin. He was cool, tasteless. He had fine downy hairs in the hollow of his lower back.
Later they lay under the mosquito net. She tried to trace the outline of the muscle that ran from his shoulder blade down to his buttocks, but he reached out and arrested her finger’s slide, capturing her hand with his hand bent behind his back.
She turned her face towards the window and tried to think of oleander, of jasmine, of a sea the colour of green oranges. Everything she has done in her life until now has been so wrong, to a point where her error might tip over an invisible meridian and become truth, and allowed in the world. Or perhaps she has always been a producer of inevitable mistakes, the errors that had to happen so that other things could happen.
Outside, the coastal bush that surrounded the house was dark, thick with negative spaces. At some point he turned out the light, which lay inside a latticed Swahili lantern. Julia had these stationed all around the house. They were a millennia-old design from Yemen, Julia had told her, they came from ancient dhows, where they were used to guide stray navigators in the hours of darkness.
IV
AMUR FALCON
‘That’s quite the book.’
The man is middle-aged, as are many of the men who come to Moholo in the high season. He is pale and square with bandy legs. It is eleven in the morning; a beer sweats in a glass in front of him. He sits at the same table at Reef Encounters where Bob, or Gary or Keith, the spook who approached Margaux and I, habitually sat, leafing through his newspaper. Margaux is here, too, in spirit, with her broad-rimmed hat and her ankles decorated with henna tattoos, her feet swollen in the heat, grasped by a pair of flip-flops.
‘Birds of Africa,’ he reads the title, just visible under my arm. ‘Keen birdwatcher, are you?
‘I’m studying for an exam. It’s for nature guides who want to specialise in birds.’
‘Are you a guide then?’
‘No, I’m a doctor. I’m just doing it out of interest.’
‘A doctor.’ His face is suddenly solemn. ‘You must be good at exams.’
‘I suppose I am.’
I turn my gaze out to sea, to signal that I want to be alone with my thoughts. I take the book out and lay it face up on the table. On the cover are a pair of D’Arnaud’s barbets and the names of the three encyclopedic Englishmen who have compiled the book.
‘What is it about birds, other than that there’s so many of them?’
He’s not the first person to ask me this question. ‘They live by their own rules. They’re mysterious.’
‘How so?’
‘They appear in the morning and the evening, usually. During the day they disappear. No one sees them, no one knows where they are. It’s as if they pass into a different dimension.’
He frowns. I sound unhinged, perhaps: disappearances, other dimensions. As if to prove me wrong an African fish eagle launches itself from the neem tree on the far side of the deck, even though it is nearly midday. It sails out over the waves in its Trappist robes, the white hood of its neck sharp against the brown of its wings.
I leaf through the book to find my weak points – thrushes, larks, warblers. I’ve never been quick to identify the small songbirds. Bird guides usually begin with the sea birds, then move on to the water birds, then the raptors. I don’t know how this order has been arrived at, but there seems to be a consensus. The raptors are hard to identify in the field, in part because there are so many of them: vultures, the secretary bird, the eagles, hawk eagles, harrier hawks, snake eagles, the goshawks and the kestrels, the falcons and the buzzards, hobbies and marsh harriers.
The lives of raptors are epic and violent. Like the migration of the Amur falcon, a small red-footed falcon with a barred breast. It breeds in Siberia and northern China but flie
s all the way to southern Africa in its migration. In India, its stopping-over grounds, it is trapped for cheap food.
Aisha took me to an acacia tree once. She had as good a bush eye as any field guide. ‘Look,’ she’d pointed into the dark interior branches of the tree. ‘It was driven there by an eagle.’
I saw a dishevelled ball, like a plastic bag that had been snagged on a branch and ripped by the wind. It was the body of a shikra, a small sparrowhawk. ‘The eagle put it there,’ Aisha said. The shikra had been trying to escape a tawny eagle, most likely, flying fast, and became entangled with the mistletoe that grew as a creeper up the acacia, then impaled itself on thorns. The tawny eagle is a handsome bird to look at with its yellow cere, its butterscotch feathers. Its Latin name is Aquila rapax meaning ‘rapacious eagle’. It is an opportunist, unafraid of attacking eagles larger than itself. It will go for smaller birds carrying food and harass them until they drop their prize.
‘Well, see you around. Have a good holiday. Good luck with the birds.’ The friendly man has finished his beer. He rises and for a moment I wonder if he is a replacement for Bob. The coast still needs its spies.
‘You know…’ I look up to see the man has paused. He turns back to me. He’s now wearing round hippie sunglasses with purple lenses. He looks like a jovial John Lennon. ‘I’ve heard birdwatching is for perfectionists and high-achievers. People who like to get things right and tick boxes. But I’m sure not everyone is like that.’
‘I’m sure,’ I say.
He melts into the dark interior, passing under the startled eye of the stuffed marlin.
I move like a fugitive. I find myself scoping rooms, using my peripheral vision, sunglasses on, my hat obscuring my face. I never thought I would come back. I was afraid to.
I am most afraid of meeting Julia. I can imagine the scene: us meeting in the narrow aisles of the local supermarket with its dusty rice-starch smell, seeing her walking towards me in those delicate silver sandals she always wore to go shopping. I am afraid of going to the house, of not going to the house. Afraid of feeling as if time had passed, of feeling as if time hadn’t passed at all.