The Dhow House

by Jean McNeil

  ‘Hello Storm. Or have you outgrown your name by now?’

  ‘I guess not.’ He did not move to kiss his aunt hello. ‘How is business?’

  Delphine sipped from her drink. ‘Not bad. I had the King and Queen of Belgium on safari last week. Although that’s confidential. I had to sign an agreement not to discuss them in public. But family isn’t public, is it?’ Delphine pointed the question in her direction.

  ‘Is that common, that you have to sign confidentiality agreements?’

  ‘Only with movie stars and royalty.’

  ‘What are these people like on safari?’

  Delphine crossed a pair of lean legs. ‘Like anyone else. Except they want cold Tattinger at four in the afternoon when you’re six hundred kilometres from the nearest electricity transformer.’

  She didn’t know what to ask next. In her professional life at least, she was used to the company of people who conversed in a series of facts and statements, who, as she suspected with Delphine, had no use for ambiguity or interpretation. But now the task exhausted her.

  She caught Storm’s eye. He raised his eyebrows. ‘Come on, I’ll show you something.’

  They left Delphine and Julia at the kitchen table and went to stand beside the pool. The afternoon was golden. Black starlings bubbled in the trees.

  ‘Why don’t you like your aunt?’

  ‘Let’s get away from the house.’ He put a finger, very lightly, on her elbow. She walked with him to the cliff edge. The fruit harvest in the Estate was in progress. The rubbery smell of burned vegetation hung in the air. Its narrow roads were clogged with lorries carrying towering loads of papaya and pineapple.

  A brown shape moved in a tree on the edge of the gardens. ‘Look,’ she pointed.

  Storm reached for the binoculars Julia had scattered around the property; a pair were always within arm’s length. They were all Swarovski, bought in England. He looked through them, then handed them to her. ‘He’s a long way from home.’

  The bird came into focus. It was tawny, with white tips on its wings. Between its claws was a small creature. Purple blood spilled from ripped fur. She recognised it from Gariseb. ‘Augur buzzard.’

  She watched it pick at the torn creature trapped in its talons. It had yellow eyes and a sharp hooked beak; its neck twitched back and forth. It ate as if it were being watched, lancing the air with its eyes left and right.

  The red flash of their tail was the clue to their name. They were easily spotted in the sky, long before they arrived. That was why they were called the augur buzzard – they came announced, like the future.

  We are tempting fate, all of us, simply by being alive, Ali’s voice said. Life does not want us here. Few people know how much conviction you must have to remain alive. In her mind his voice was ghostly, a dead man come back to life. But he was not dead.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’

  ‘A man I treated. An insurgent. He told me the reason why the augur buzzard has his name. He nearly killed me.’

  In his eyes she saw suspicion – or distaste. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ll tell you another time.’

  ‘I don’t think I can compete with your secrets.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to.’

  ‘You’re not here, you’re somewhere else. I can’t go there.’

  She had never seen his anguish before. She wondered if it were even within his capacity. A primitive self sensed an advantage. If she did reveal herself to Storm he might close her as neatly as he would shut a book, leave her the way he walked away from all objects – mobile phones, rigging ropes, cars – with an impatience that was almost audible, as if these objects had dealt him a grave disappointment.

  Delphine’s voice reached them on the wind. It was deep – unusually so, for a woman. She had a lanky, hoarse laugh that was attractive but which also harboured a threat. Storm cast a wary glance towards the house.

  ‘She reminds me of a lioness,’ she said.

  ‘Well, she could kill all of us if she chose.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘She was a professional hunter. She was famous all over Africa. Or white Africa, the only woman who did it.’

  ‘Why did she give it up?’ She imagined that Delphine might have lost the stomach for killing, after a while.

  ‘The money’s in conservation now. People want to look at animals, not kill them.’ Storm frowned. His face was distorted by uncertainty. ‘I wish she weren’t here. It’s all wrong.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Dad’s party. What’s happening in the country. Everything. It feels like it could all go wrong. For the first time in my life, I think it might not be possible for us to stay here.’

  ‘Let’s go out,’ she said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Anywhere. Some roadside bar. A place locals go. Let’s get away from here.’

  They did not make excuses to Julia and Delphine. They got in the car and drove to Moholo. By the time they arrived the sun was setting. Storm turned off the tarmac road just before the village and took them on a gravel road she had never been on before. It headed north, hugging the coastline. The tide was out, exposing coral and mudflats. Greenshanks and herons skipped across them. The breakers had drawn back, beyond the reef. She smelled jasmine.

  He turned down another road, towards the sea. This road was lined with shacks and unfinished breeze-block constructions. Inside them, where living rooms or bedrooms might one day exist, goats picked at brown grass.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Coral Bay. It’s part of Moholo, but the only tourists here are Italians from the all-inclusive resorts up the road.’

  They drove past a row of tiny dukas papered with paintings that showed spindly figures in red robes poised against amber skies. She counted four shacks in a row, all selling identical paintings, interspersed with shops with tomatoes and eggs piled up outside, covered in signs for mobile phone credit.

  They passed a restaurant named Les Blancs and an Italian ice-cream parlour where families sat outside, the men smoking and drinking espresso as their wives and children ate ice cream. Next door the women who minded the identical souvenir painting stalls sat on plastic chairs, their legs flung out straight in front of them, gesticulating and laughing. A motorcycle with three women wedged together riding pillion streamed by her window. In the distance she could see the sparse electric lights of Kilindoni and Moholo stutter on.

  They pulled up in front of a sturdy structure. A yellow-and-green sign hung above the entrance. Mysteries.

  He got out of the car. She followed him through the lip of the entrance, past two burly men in black shirts and white ties who nodded to Storm, the barest of gestures.

  ‘Storm.’

  ‘Lucio.’

  A tall, thin man with a gold earring in his left earlobe had wrapped his arms around Storm and was beaming at her. ‘This is your sister! Your sister! Finally.’

  ‘No, this is my cousin.’

  She found herself embraced in the same frantic hug.

  ‘Business is quiet, sorry.’ Lucio’s mouth sank into a cartoon frown. ‘All the wageni have left.’

  They seated themselves at an oval bar. The waitresses wore a uniform, bosoms held tight in white shirts and micro-shorts, which showed off their hamstrings. Around the bar were four or five shaven-headed men with tattoos on their forearms. Next to them young women nursed a solitary glass of white wine and stared at their mobile phones with profound boredom.

  ‘What is this place?’

  ‘A bar, a club. The local pickup joint.’ Storm shrugged. ‘Only Italians and locals come here.’

  They had a mojito at the bar then crossed the single dozy street and sat in white plastic chairs as a hard-working man brought them kuku choma, grilled chicken, with chapattis and kachumbari, a salad of tomato and red onion, from his kiosk. Storm told her about the food of the coast – ugali, a polenta-like grain that sat like a truck in the stomach, sukuma wi
ki, spinach, whose local name meant ‘to push the week’ because Africans ate it at the end of the week, when money for meat had run out.

  For the first time since she had met him she felt at home in Storm’s company. Or no, that was not quite right – she had always felt an inexplicable serenity when she was near him, which had nothing to do with what they said, or would say, to each other. She had never felt this before, with any human being, and didn’t know what to call it.

  After they had eaten they sat back in their plastic chairs and assumed the posture of the locals, whose cinema or theatre was the street, watching trim middle-aged men wearing loose white shirts, knee-length shorts and loafers enter Mysteries alone only to emerge within the hour with a racehorse-thin woman on their arms; a gaggle of underage girls all wearing tight red and green dresses, like Christmas presents, charmed their way in past the bouncers; the Land Cruisers piling up outside the club as the night went on. Shy girls who couldn’t have been more than ten years old condensed out of the night and sat on the kerb nearby, staring at them with huge, amazed eyes. Beggars came and went. Storm always gave them something. Thank you, bwana, black men murmured to him, calling him sir even though they were more than twice his age, their hands cupped in supplication. Thank you.

  The news reached them via the coastal newsletter, a round robin of local news sent by email. Al-Nur had attacked three villages to the north, near the border. The attacks took place on subsequent nights. A football match between Senegal and France was being televised and the Stay A While bar was heaving.

  They came in pickup trucks carrying AKs. They were masked. They went from house to house, ordering the women out in gruff Arabic. While the women and children were running through the night, hiding in the bush, they shot the men who could not recite verses from the Quran.

  At the Car Wash bar twenty kilometres away it took two or three seconds for the football fans seated at the tables to register that this band of men wearing balaclavas were not going to order a round of Cokes. By then they were dead, high-velocity projectiles having ripped through their livers, their spleens.

  On the third night they drove even further south, ramming their way through a roadblock. They set fire to a hotel outbuilding in Bahari ya Manda and threw a grenade over the wall into the Isla Amor resort in Moholo.

  ‘Reef Encounters is completely undefended,’ Julia said. ‘They could pull up in a pickup and kill us all. I don’t know if we should go out on the dhow.’ This was where Bill’s birthday drinks would be held – a dhow, hired especially for the occasion. They would sail not more than four hundred metres offshore. Any further was not safe.

  She heard Delphine’s coppery voice say, ‘Come on, Julia. If you change your plans then the terrorists have won.’

  Now, every time Storm went out sailing, Julia was worried. There was no phone reception eight kilometres out to sea. ‘I lie in bed and see the boat speeding towards them, guns sticking out. I see them climbing aboard. Storm would swim for it. He’s a strong swimmer. He would make it back. These guys, they can’t even swim.’

  ‘They’d shoot him if he ran for it, Julia. He’s only valuable to them alive.’

  Her aunt stared at her, repulsion in her eyes. She regretted what she’d said, which came from her Gariseb self, who dealt with death each day as if it were washing powder. She’d imbibed enough cruelty to become cruel herself. She hadn’t realised this had happened.

  You’re going to get a message from someone. The sentence inserted itself between her thoughts. Since the afternoon when the sports fisherman spook had approached her, she’d batted the episode away. What could he know? He and Anthony might encounter each other in the capital. But if Anthony had anything to convey to her he would have just called her. There was no reason for him to use subterfuge.

  But now the air was becoming denser. She listened to herself, waiting for the moment when the giant realm she had described to Margaux might speak to her again.

  She played out scenes in her mind those nights, of what was happening in those towns where they arrived to evict and murder the Bantu, the Christians, the Kufir, unbelievers. And if they came further south, to the threshold of Kilindoni?

  She knew how they would come: on a bus, dressed in Western clothes, their assault rifles wrapped in T-shirts so as to not rattle in their holdalls. They would travel on separate buses with false documents, puffing out their drastic faces at the army roadblocks. They would leap out of the buses at the crossroads where the coastal highway intersected with the eight-kilometre-long road into Moholo and hijack two minibuses, taking the drivers with them. It would be so fast, no one would know, although perhaps one dusty boy loitering at the gas station on the corner would see, but he would not know who to phone and perhaps he had never used a phone in his life. In any case the police would have deserted their stations long ago in any case, knowing they would be the first to be killed.

  The night would be ripped open by the spin of sand on the wheels of the approaching trucks. They would flee, stumbling down the coastal path, perhaps being stopped at the tunnel underneath the coral cliff by high tide. Charlie the dog would be shot first. They would open fire while shouting, Allahu Akbar! Or perhaps there would be no shouting, only the soundless rip of bullets.

  She knew the pointed-nosed copper alloy bullets, their trajectories. She had plucked their lead bases out of sternums with tweezers. She didn’t know how it would feel to have one tear through her thorax. It would feel like she were being punched, or perhaps she would feel just a sting. At first she would think, thank God, it grazed me. But there would be a hole in her throat, and a severed carotid artery. There would be no repair. Even if she could operate on herself with a mirror, her bloodied hands would slip, she didn’t have her instruments, and there was no anaesthetic. For once her powers would fail her.

  The sky was the colour of gunmetal. Ghost crabs scattered at her approach. The crabs scavenged the beach for turtle fledglings, for dead fish and the small blue bubbles of marooned Portuguese men-of-war that popped beneath her feet.

  She passed a cart hauled by two donkeys and men dressed in kanzus and kofia, on their way to prayer. With the vanishing of tourists the beach had resumed an earlier incarnation. It must have looked like this a thousand years ago; slim fishing dhows, their sails unfurled, safe within the reef for the night, greenshanks and curlews tripping along the sand with their piping cry.

  A figure appeared on the horizon. As she approached she saw a salmon-coloured kikoi and dark hair blowing in the breeze. She recognised Lucy by her stride, a sashay, childlike and winning.

  They sat down on the sand and looked out to sea. A single ghost crab passed in front of them, dragging a piece of pineapple covered in sand into its lair. The recoil of the tide had exposed grey-green outcroppings of coral. The sulphurous scent of saltpetre hung in the air.

  ‘I’ve been here for three weeks now and this is the first time we’ve met outside the house,’ Lucy said.

  ‘There’s nowhere to meet by chance here. There’s no public space, apart from bars and hotels. And the beach, of course,’ she added.

  ‘True.’ Lucy’s long eyelashes batted shut, then open. ‘Not like in London, where we could have met at the South Bank, or in Covent Garden. But we wouldn’t have recognised each other.’

  She stole a look at her cousin. Lucy had been absent enough from the house that she was still taking her in. She saw dark blue eyes, a colour not unlike her own. Unusually long eyelashes framed them so that even when she wore no makeup she looked as if she had lined her eyes. Henna tattoos spiralled down her calves.

  ‘Why do you want to be a psychologist?’ she ventured.

  ‘I wanted to be different, I suppose. It’s a rebellion.’

  ‘Different from who?’

  ‘Than the people I’d grown up among. I was fascinated by people. I don’t know that most people here are. People don’t count here.’

  ‘What does count?’

  Lucy was silent for a wh
ile. ‘Race. Money.’ She gave her a conspiratorial glance. ‘It’s too brutal for me. Maybe it was an elaborate way to gain integrity.’

  ‘You didn’t have that here?’

  ‘Here, where people are running guns to Somalia disguised as maize or cement? Or shipping ivory to China disguised as furniture?’

  ‘Is that what people do? Who?’

  Lucy turned her eyes on her. She saw a dark lane within them, a path protected by an arbour of trees. ‘I can’t tell you that. Or I could, but I couldn’t prove it. So what’s the point? It all becomes rumour, which is like the air here. People need it, they subsist on it.’ She paused. ‘Most of Mum’s friends don’t even want to know what their husbands do, but they want the money for the children’s school fees and the shopping trips to South Africa to keep coming, and that’s another reason they don’t ask. Their husbands prefer it that way. Everyone is happy.’

  ‘Except you.’

  ‘Me? I actually like the fact that there are rules in England, that there is an accepted code of behaviour, that everyone is not manoeuvring –’ she gave the ocean a fierce look – ‘nakedly for their advantage.’

  ‘Naked manoeuvring is what made the British Empire. You could say here there’s less of a moral failure in it, because there was never any state to protect people. People do it to survive. Your father, for instance –’ she paused, unsure of where her venture might lead. ‘He strikes me as the quintessential survivor.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘He’s been flexible. He’s set up farms and businesses, invested well, and moved on when the moment was right.’ She corrected herself, ‘Before the moment was right.’

  Lucy studied her. ‘Did he tell you all that?’

  ‘No, your mother did.’

  Lucy’s gaze remained on her, as if something was not quite right.

  ‘What do I know? I don’t even know how many businesses Dad owns, or has owned.’ Lucy said, finally. ‘I’m just not interested enough. Don’t get me wrong, he’s paid for my education, he’s set me up in life. I’m not going to bite the hand that feeds me. I’m very grateful. Too much so to criticise him to strangers.’ Lucy darted her a look. ‘Not that you’re that.’ Lucy gathered her knees up under her chin. ‘I’m only thinking about all this now. It’s taken me years to feel at home in the world, to get some perspective. Growing up here was like an extended childhood.’