The Dhow House

by Jean McNeil

  Margaux flinched slightly. Perhaps she had caught her impatient tone. She was used to inhabiting zones of danger and had little interest in discussing whether or not a grenade would be thrown across Reef Encounters’ deck any time soon.

  ‘I don’t know if I’d cope with people dying around me all the time,’ Margaux said.

  ‘But you dig up the dead.’

  ‘That’s the point. They’re already dead. I’ve never seen anyone die. Have you ever been to talk to someone?’

  ‘You mean a psychiatrist? When we go back to the UK we are debriefed. There’s plenty of counselling.’

  ‘But it doesn’t help?’

  ‘To be honest I can diagnose myself. I’ve had post-traumatic stress disorder. Anxiety disorder, panic attacks, you name it.’

  ‘You must have been afraid.’

  She tried to keep her voice light, glancing. ‘Mostly when under attack from the air. That’s my least favourite mode of attack. It’s too sitting duck.’ As she said this she saw the roof above their heads at Reef Encounters shattering, splinters raining down, the raw exposure, subjected to the scattershot will of an angry air-god. ‘Once, the operating theatre wasn’t hit, but outlying buildings were. Two of our support staff and fifteen goats were blown to bits. Some of the patients started grabbing the hunks of goat flesh and stuffing them in their bags to hoard. But it wasn’t all goat. They still had the skin on them and we’d taken away all their knives, so they were upset.’

  Margaux’s grimaced.

  ‘One time we were running through a wheat field; the wheat had just been cut and it was sharp,’ she said. ‘I had paper cuts all over my hands and wrists from it. I couldn’t avoid the cut stalks because we were carrying a stretcher. I was holding an IV bag with my other hand. It was strange because I knew that day would be different. The sky was yellow and the wheat was blue. Do you see that? I wanted to ask someone – anyone, Roddy who was with me, or Mike, my senior. The sky is yellow and the wheat is blue. That day everything felt etched. The way the wheat looked against the sky, it was as if they had just been drawn or sketched that morning. The gleam on their edges was fresh.’

  ‘What did you think that meant?’

  ‘It was a sign.’

  ‘From what? From who?’

  She drew a breath. She hadn’t intended to go down this road at all with Margaux. She was wary of confiding in her, but her very reluctance prodded her to do carry on.

  ‘I have a theory. We all exist in a reality that is actually a vast simulation, but it’s moving and changing all the time. It’s a plasmic realm. As humans we see only a very narrow sector of it, as if we are in a tunnel. We just haven’t got the capacity to see the entire dimension. But sometimes, in heightened situations, it’s possible to leave the tunnel and be in contact with this invisible realm. If it suits it, it will communicate to us. The etched quality of everything that day was an example of it trying to communicate. It was telling us, Get out of there.’

  Margaux had turned to look at the sea. Her brow had furrowed. She had never shared her theory with anyone. She knew how it sounded. She also knew she was not a good storyteller – she never started at A, then proceeded to B. There were few beginnings, middles and ends, in her experience, for all her medical understanding of cause and effect. Things that happened to her presented themselves as a pane of ready-shattered glass.

  ‘Why were you out there in the first place?’

  ‘We were transporting a guy out, just in front of the line. We didn’t do that often, not on foot anyway. But that day there were sandstorms and there was no vis for the pilots. So they put us in by truck and we had to reach him on foot. Snipers. We knew they were there but we thought they didn’t have the range. They must have had a new shipment of scopes. Likely bought from a British company in Saudi Arabia. We would have been killed by our own hardware, probably.’

  Behind Margaux’s shoulder three kitesurfers curled into the air. Their kites billowed, levering them above the ocean. They hung there, suspended on the wind, before slapping back onto the sea.

  ‘It can be healing, this place,’ Margaux said. ‘The nature, the swimming. You need that.’

  ‘You’re saying I’m damaged.’

  ‘Life is damaging enough, without putting yourself in the line of fire.’

  She thought this was melodramatic, but did not say so.

  She found herself looking down at her hands then. She saw very small brown spots littering the area just above her wrist. They were new. This had been happening lately – small changes in the depth of the lines around her eyes, a stray grey hair. These signs of ageing weren’t happening gradually. One day they weren’t there and the next they were.

  Margaux’s gaze drifted behind her shoulder. ‘Don’t look now but we’ve got company.’

  She looked up and found the man who had sat near their table on their last visit. The sun was swallowed by his shoulders.

  ‘Hello ladies.’

  ‘Hi there,’ Margaux said amiably. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘I’d like to have a word.’ With the subtlest of inclinations of his head, he indicated her.

  ‘What is this about?’

  ‘It won’t take a moment.’

  ‘Unless you tell me what this is about in the presence of my friend, we’re not going to talk.’

  Margaux darted her a surprised look. She was amazed at how her voice had changed, become upright and commanding. Even her accent had stiffened. How quickly she’d become the version of herself she had left behind in Gariseb on the weed-eaten airstrip. An instant regression.

  The man put his hands on the table, his fingers forming a tent, although his palms did not touch its surface. She found her gaze arrested on this detail; she had seen it before. It was the way men who might take flight at any moment touched surfaces.

  Margaux rose. ‘I’ll leave you to it then.’ It was such an English phrasing she looked sharply into Margaux’s eyes.

  To the man she deployed her clinician’s voice. ‘Sit down.’

  He lowered his frame into the chair. He looked over his shoulder, then back. He wore a blue T-shirt. Across it a marlin leaped from a wave in white relief. Underneath she read Quepos, Costa Rica, 2005.

  ‘You’re going to get a message from someone. Someone you knew, but not from him directly, through an intermediary. We don’t know his name. They’ll want you to meet up.’

  ‘Where will they want me to meet him?’

  ‘Here,’ he paused. ‘On the coast.’ He moved his head. His hair shifted strangely – was he wearing a wig?

  The thought blared through her: It’s him. How can it be him?

  ‘How do they know I’m here?’

  ‘When he gets in touch, you call me.’ He handed her a blank card with a phone number written on it in blue ink.

  She watched him go. He walked slowly, but not with that falsely lackadaisical step she’d observed in other intelligence agents who were trying hard to be nonchalant in public places. She watched him pass into the dark entrance stairs, then emerge outside, where was immediately consumed in a blare of white sun.

  She sat for a while afterwards, trying to read her reaction. It was familiar, even reassuring, that feeling of the very air drawing itself close around her.

  Lucy greeted her at the door. ‘So what have you been up to, Rebecca?’

  ‘Reading, running. I’ve been going to the ruins.’

  ‘The ruins? I haven’t been there since I was a kid. That’s what happens, isn’t it, you start to take your surroundings for granted. Even in London.’

  ‘I’ve been to a couple of parties with Storm,’ she offered.

  Lucy raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re lucky. He never takes me anywhere. It’s a miracle I ever met Evan at all.’

  Lucy walked into the living room. Lucy’s had her mother’s airy voice but there was a careful, formal quality to its friendliness. Her sugary English complexion had darkened. Two inches of bracelets were now lined up on her wrist.
Her nails were painted different colours; pastel green for the index and fifth fingers, purple and pink for the ones in between. She wore a new bikini every day, she had noticed, paired with a different kikoi. She padded barefoot through the house, slightly pigeon toed and yawning, her eyeliner smudged, like a recently deposed Cleopatra.

  The friendship she had hoped for had not materialised. Lucy had so many friends on the coast. She had gone to nursery school in Moholo, had done her GCSEs in an international school in a suburb of Bahari ya Manda before being sent to England for A-levels. All this she had gleaned from Julia. ‘Lucy was too smart for the schools here,’ Julia had said. ‘We realised we were doing her a disservice by trying to keep her close.’ She was sent to a bohemian boarding school in Wiltshire that had its own indoor swimming pool.

  ‘I was hoping you could help us out with Dad’s party,’ Lucy said. ‘There are a few catering things Mum and I usually take care of.’

  ‘How many people will come?’

  ‘About thirty. Only family and close friends.’

  ‘Your father has a lot of friends.’

  Lucy shrugged. ‘He has a lot of people he needs to keep impressed.’

  She watched Lucy climb the stairs now, the arches of her feet curling above steps, walking as if she was not required to touch the ground.

  ‘Just let me know what you need me to do,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks, Rebecca.’ Halfway up the spiral staircase Lucy turned and gave her a guileless smile. ‘It’s so good to have you around. I wish you’d been here, with us, all these years.’

  She was amazed to find tears in her eyes. She didn’t want Lucy to see. She turned away, just in time.

  That night she and Julia were alone in the house. The wind had come up. She watched her aunt move around the living room, closing the louvres, drawing blinds and shutting doors.

  When she finished Julia came to sit next to her on the baraza. She had never been so physically close to her aunt, apart from the quick, efficient hugs Julia dispensed, or when they breezed past each other in the kitchen. Julia emitted a more muted version of the firecracker energy which surrounded Storm.

  ‘I’ve broken into the wine cellar.’ Julia held up a bottle of Paarl sauvignon blanc she had imported from South Africa. ‘It seems we’re on our own tonight. Storm and Lucy have so many friends.’

  ‘They seem very rooted here,’ she agreed.

  ‘Yes, but they’ll live their lives elsewhere, an eight-hour flight away. I’m always thinking about that, as soon as I meet them at the airport. How long have I got?’

  ‘But Storm doesn’t want to go.’

  ‘He’ll see sense, this time.’ Julia paused. ‘I have to let go.’ The wine seemed to have affected her mood instantly. Something had condensed inside her.

  ‘It’s different with the first born. I was told it would be, but I never believed it. From the beginning I felt that he wasn’t just my child, my son, but my companion. As soon as I saw him I thought, yes, I am responsible for your life. But you are also responsible for mine. We will help each other. I didn’t feel burdened.’

  ‘You treat Storm as if he’s the one in charge,’ she said. ‘As if you’re only waiting to hand over to him.’

  Julia looked at her. ‘You sound like your mother.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s the way you put things. Although you’re more intellectual. Or maybe more analytical. Your mother was very intelligent. She just didn’t have a chance to develop herself.’

  She heard the heft of judgement, or worse, pity, in Julia’s voice. But also an implication, as if she might be responsible for her mother’s arrested development.

  The sea sighed against the low cliff. Julia put her drink down. ‘Why didn’t it work?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your mother. You. You never seemed close. She was surprised by you. She wasn’t ready to have a child. Not that I know much about it. She didn’t confide in me.’

  Desperation flooded her. ‘It must happen sometimes, between mothers and daughters.’

  Julia nodded, her mouth set. ‘I’m glad I don’t have to face that, with Lucy.’ She brought her gaze back and met her eyes. Her eyes had the same swooping trajectory as Storm’s. They arrived on a side current, from a long way away. ‘You know, I had a very narrow escape. Your grandfather –’ she gave a sharp shake of her head – ‘he ruined everything.’

  She knew the story, at least in outline. She had known her grandparents only as separate entities. They had split up long before she was born. Her grandmother lived in a flat in Kentish Town. Her grandfather lived with his second wife in a village in Sussex topped by a brown box of a church. When Julia and her mother were teenagers he’d left her grandmother for another woman. Her grandmother, who had never worked, was given a paltry settlement. They had been brought up only millimetres from the poverty line.

  ‘I don’t know, Julia. It’s complicated.’

  ‘It’s not.’ Julia’s eyes were indifferent. ‘Everyone says that, but it’s really quite simple. You hold a marriage and a family together.’

  ‘No matter what?’

  ‘Look what happened to your mother and I.’

  She realised she had never made the connection between her grandfather’s abandonment of the family and Julia’s dread of poverty, although of a genteel kind, in their case. She had missed a diagnosis.

  ‘Your mother said, Why marry into money, Julia, and be kept like a pet cheetah when women have fought for rights and independence. Why live like it’s the 1950s?’

  ‘But she was right, don’t you think?’

  Her aunt gave her a long, regal stare. ‘I don’t know if you’ll ever have children.’

  She shrank back into the sofa. ‘How can you say that?’

  Julia lowered her gaze, in a kind of shame, perhaps. ‘I’m sorry. I’m very intuitive. It’s just a feeling I have.’

  She woke the next morning with a feeling of malaise, a sensation that increased with each hour. She went for a walk on the beach to try to shake it off, but managed only ten minutes before she had to lay down on the sand, her head tilted to one side in an effort to dispel a sudden light-headedness.

  Ghost crabs scattered horizontally in her path, the patterns of their tracks like stitching on the sand. In the distance were two knots of children, one black, one white. At the tip of the beach kitesurfers twirled in the air like giant water birds. Clouds advanced from the south-east in two chevrons over the wedge of Tern Island. Beyond it was a gauzy morning moon.

  She put her hand to her forehead. Her temperature had shot up four or five degrees in the last half-hour. She didn’t know if she had the strength to walk back to the house.

  ‘What are you doing here? I’ve been looking for you.’

  She blinked into the sky. Storm was peering at her. ‘I’m not feeling well.’

  His approach blotted out the moon’s muslin. He sat down beside her, collapsing his long limbs.

  ‘I don’t want to give you this, whatever it is.’

  She felt a hand on her face and realised it was his. ‘I don’t want you to be ill.’ His voice was hoarse with an emotion she could not read.

  She felt her hand make its way to his. She gripped his fingers, held them beside her jawbone.

  The screech of a child and a squawk from a roseate tern on a fly-by came to them in the same moment. They looked in the direction of the child; their hands fell away from her face. The imprint of his hand remained on her fingers.

  Tears, strangely cool, drew rivulets down her hot face. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I…’ There was a knot of darkness inside her. ‘We shouldn’t…’ She stalled.

  ‘Let’s get you back to the house.’ He put his hand on her elbow and gently lifted her off the beach. She resisted for a moment.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I have this feeling, that we’re being watched.’

  He l
ooked towards the house. ‘I don’t think so.’

  The tide tossed clumps of greasy seaweed ashore. He wrapped a kikoi around her shoulders. They walked against the advancing tide and the wedge of steel cloud in the sky.

  The world was drawing itself an electric outline. She knew what this meant: it was gathering its perimeters, taking on the etched quality that her senior Mike had taught her to be suspicious of nearly ten years ago now. It meant the future was decided. It was speaking to her from a dimension over the horizon of time.

  He walked beside her, scowling into the sky. Her lungs were made of lead. She couldn’t speak, or breathe, or think. She was so afraid. Was it possible to lust for something, or someone, when you possessed them? She could not withstand much passion or lust, they had the dank ring of things that could only be solved in death.

  She shivered. Julia’s voice rang in her head, suddenly. It sounded so like her mother’s, but soldered with rage. We gave you sanctuary. We are your family. And this is what you do to us.

  Delphine appeared in the late afternoon. She descended the spiral staircase, wearing a pair of khaki bush shorts paired with a blouse that must have been Indian, with its riot of greens and pinks. She was the embodiment of her author photograph, a willowy lean woman of indeterminate age.

  ‘Rebecca,’ Delphine’s voice was brisk. ‘Where do you come from then?’

  ‘London.’

  ‘Well then, let’s have a drink.’

  Delphine had Storm’s eyes, or he hers. She kept staring into them, one and then the other, looking for clues to more familiar resemblances. She had his airy indifference, too. There was a theatrical quality to both of them, which was only partially explained by their physical beauty, by the fact that faces would have been rotating towards them all their lives, as sunflowers turn to face the sun.

  Delphine’s eyes were on her. Her gaze was level, the sort of flensing, evaluative look she had met in military analysts. ‘So, what do you do?’

  ‘She’s a doctor.’

  Storm had appeared soundlessly, as usual. He wore a pair of sand-coloured shorts and a necklace made of bone. He came to stand beside her. Delphine’s eye shuttled between them.