The Dhow House

by Jean McNeil

  ‘What about the sky?’

  She got up from the bed and began to pace the room, listening to the drone of the night ocean. She wished she could explain to him, how she wanted not to know, for a change. Not to have the answers, not to be responsible, not to have to act. She wanted to erase herself into a nullity, to take the idea of herself back and back in time’s long spiral staircase, to the double helix of DNA, to the void moment before conception, before her mother understood she might be possible. But that moment had erased itself long ago.

  He hooked an arm behind her neck and pulled her towards him with a single loop, as she’d seen him grapple filusi onto the boat. She remembered the way the fish shimmered from blue to yellow as it changed colour, ripples of pink, brown, silver, amethyst swimming through its body, how it paled into grey as it died.

  Sixty people stood barefoot on the teak deck of the dhow. Lucy wore a backless black dress whose slip skirt stopped above her knees; a sheath of material flowed on, brushing her ankles. She wore no jewelry, other than a green beaded necklace. Her dark hair was tied behind her head in a bun. Next to her Delphine stood in a fuchsia dress that hung off thin shoulders.

  Their eyes met. Delphine had caught her watching. She felt instantly stripped bare by those cold grey eyes.

  The other women who joined the party that evening were so similar in physicality and spirit she had difficulty distinguishing between them with their straight blonde hair, their racehorses bodies. Their thinness extended to their narrow child’s feet. Women insisted on going shoeless to restaurants and parties on the coast. It seemed a badge of honour among them. It meant they were free, she supposed. There was another possibility; in their insistence on being unshod in public they meant to show that they had tamed the country, dominated it entirely. Africans also went shoeless, but not by choice.

  She didn’t know if these women were as bored and underutilised as Margaux avowed they were, because they never spoke to her. They eyed her, saw that she was not from here, and that most likely soon she would be gone. She had only her race in common with these women, an insufficient communion.

  The captain cast off. The dhow drifted towards the reef. As the shore receded she noticed a group of men, each straddling a motorcycle. They remained under a tarpaulin shade, their motorbikes idle, handlebars turned to one side like the heads of shy cats. These motorcycle taxi drivers were so ubiquitous she’d ceased to see them. Why then did one catch her eye? He wore a helmet. That was unusual enough.

  She turned back. The man had taken his helmet off. He had removed his sunglasses and his helmet was held in the crook of his arm. He was rangy, darker and taller than the rest. He had hungry eyes.

  The dhow lurched on the crest of a wave. She stumbled backwards. A man in a white shirt and trousers made from kikois had to catch her. She felt eyes on her. Everyone probably thought she was drunk.

  When she turned back the man had gone. In the lane, swallowed by the dark drape of a single palm tree, she saw a retreating motorcycle melt into its shadow.

  That night she always knew where Storm was, even when she could not see him. There was a new reserve in the way he moved in space, as if he were being careful not to align himself too closely. The crowd conspired in this new détente of theirs; if they moved towards each other, it generated someone who needed a drink refilled to separate them. Whenever their eyes hooked on each other people closed like a cordon around him.

  On the dhow, at sea, she felt the weight of their collusion but it did not threaten to sink her. Secrets had become possible, then familiar, then necessary to her being. This had all happened over a matter of months. The withholding, conflicted slant in Storm’s eye that night confirmed to her that he was new to secrets. He did not approve but was surprised to find himself enlivened by them.

  She sat on a bench and leaned over the gunwale, watching the black water slip from the hull. She tried to forget about the motorcycle man she had seen, and the memory he had excavated.

  Storm detached himself from a knot of people and sat beside her. She had to move away from him. It was like the wind coming to sit with her.

  ‘Dad wants me to leave next week. He’s putting me on a plane. He’s not giving me a choice. He says we’re not safe here.’

  ‘You’re not safe anywhere. It’s time for all of us to go, one way or the other,’ she said.

  He stared straight ahead. ‘You want me to leave.’

  ‘I want you to save yourself. It’s what I would do. That way we have a chance of seeing each other again, some day.’

  He looked startled. It might not have occurred to him that they would see each other ever again. Even she was not sure they existed, or rather that the versions of Storm and Rebecca who knew each other here could exist in another place.

  ‘Do you really think we could die here?’

  ‘I’m not the best person to ask. I see death all the time.’

  ‘I know,’ he said quickly.

  ‘Your mother could have been killed last week in that attack, if she’d gone to the supermarket,’ she went on, spurred by an instinct to shock him. ‘Do you really think nothing is going to happen if Al-Nur gain control of the coast?’

  ‘That’s not going to happen.’ Even as he said it, he looked unsure. She saw how unfamiliar he was with consequences, with remorse. He was a clean slate, he was – or had been – happy.

  The dhow drifted in calm waters. The moon rose higher in the sky. In its bone light she saw faces huddled on the beach, the flames of braziers, a family’s only light. They would sleep that night in one-room shacks where they would be bitten by mosquitoes and jigger worms would burrow into the feet of shoeless children. She could see their eyes, bright in the darkness. They watched as the dhow floated, hurricane lamps and garlands of bougainvillea hung across its riggings. They would see women on the deck of dhow changing positions like chess pieces, the shrouds of their dresses billowing behind them as the dhow slid beyond the perimeter of night.

  The days that followed Bill’s birthday party had the feel of departure. Storm and Lucy’s plane tickets were bought, decisions about where they would live were made. Their father transferred money into their accounts and gave instructions about how to access more should they need it. The fact that Bill and Julia allowed her to overhear their talk of money she took as a sign of trust.

  She began to take note of things that had slipped her attention before – the change in the clouds, for example. They had changed from the turbulent grey monoliths of the Kusi monsoon to become cathedral-like, stately and serene. The beach was clean. The dawn came earlier – only by a minute or two, but on her morning runs she could do without her head torch now. The rainstorms that had lashed the house at dawn for the nearly two months she had been in residence subsided.

  She began to hoard the detail of life there. She wanted to imprint it all on her consciousness: the razors of shade the doum palms threw on the sand, the dignified Swahili lanterns Julia had placed in alcoves, the whistle of mosque swallows as they strafed the coconut palms in the evening and which sounded so much like the wind. She had at last come to a casual acceptance of time, now when it was very nearly over. All this – the detail of the land and light and sky – might one day be precious to her, she understood, it would cease to be a place and instead become a sacred code.

  ‘Tell me how you got involved with this again?’

  ‘At the site,’ Margaux said. ‘They do bird counts there. They’ll be five people, all from the national ornithological society.’

  ‘Let me get this straight. They catch the birds to count them?’

  ‘That’s right; every year they ring them. There are guys in Ethiopia, even in Yemen, doing it too, can you imagine? They find time in between being bombed to study the migration patterns of ringed plovers.’

  They sped down the coastal highway south to the estuary of the Sarara river. Margaux drove and she looked out the window. The road was a constant theatre. Now a young man wearing a red T-sh
irt walked down the road with a black-and-white goat slung across his shoulders like a fur stole. Three women dozed in a makeshift shelter surrounded by baskets of pale mangoes, hoping for roadside trade. A young man approached them wearing a silver lamé suit and a gangster fedora. The sun caught his suit with the same glint as the Defenders and Prados that charged up and down the highway.

  ‘You’re thinking,’ Margaux said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘About having to leave. That’s why I’m watching the road. I’m storing up images because I’m already fading out of the picture.’

  Margaux was silent. She had not mentioned Storm since the day of their conversation on the deck at Reef Encounters, and Margaux had not brought it up either. It occurred to her that far from feeling contaminated by her, Margaux might be entirely detached – from her dilemma, from her fate, or anyone’s. Margaux had grown up everywhere and nowhere; other people’s fates might not be entirely real to her because she did not stay long enough to witness them. She would become an interesting anecdote for her: the woman I met on the coast who fell in love with her cousin fourteen years her junior. The dignified woman who made an avoidable mistake.

  They turned off onto a sandy road and drove through a tangle of mangroves.

  The river was partly tidal, Margaux had told her. They rounded a corner and saw torn ribbons of breakers where the river and the ocean collided. The beach was a horizontal field of grey. These were the mudflats where the birds fed at night.

  It was sundown when they pulled up in front of a small hut at the edge of the river. Here five men sat in the gathering evening. A man wearing a polo shirt and a New York Giants baseball cap stood up. He introduced himself as one of the professors from the national university. He bent down and produced a white-and-black bird with long red legs like stilts. ‘We just caught him in our test net.’

  Suddenly the bird was in her hands. It felt like holding a bundle of string. It was trembling so violently she worried it would shake itself free of her grip. She stroked it to reassure it.

  ‘That’s good,’ the man said. ‘We hold it like that, then we put the ring on.’ She saw the tiny aluminium anklet on the bird’s leg, a number imprinted upon it.

  ‘What does this tell you?’

  ‘This is one of our rings, so this bird lives here, but it migrates to the Comoros. Someone caught it there and posted the number on the Internet. That’s how we know. Now it’s time to let it go. Would you like to release it?’

  They walked to the edge of the water. The plover trembled in her hands. Its heart beat so quickly she feared it would die.

  ‘How should I let it go?’

  ‘Just put it down in the water.’

  She walked to the edge of the liquorice-coloured mud. The light was waning and the sky was indistinguishable from the water. From afar might have looked as if she were levitating.

  She bent down and uncupped her hand. The plover took two uncertain steps in the water before bursting into flight. She watched as it was consumed by the sky.

  ‘You need to get to the birds before the monkeys.’ Margaux handed her a spiral of entangling net. ‘They’re mostly asleep by now but keep an eye out for them. Just walk along the path and let it unfurl. Keep the top loop around your thumb.’

  ‘Do the monkeys kill the birds?’

  ‘They tear them apart alive. Then they eat them.’

  She shrank at the image and quickly unfurled the net in a single sheet. Once unwound the mesh was invisible against the green of the forest.

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘Now we wait for the birds to come. Two hours, I reckon.’ Margaux looked out over the estuary. ‘Let’s go for a paddle.’

  ‘It’s looking stormy.’

  ‘Don’t worry. The estuary is only waist-deep.’

  A thin man came towards them, stepping through the shallows rigidly, his knees flexing like a stork’s. Behind him a rough-hewn canoe followed obediently, towed on a rope.

  They got in. There were no seats or struts; she and Margaux sat low, inside the hull. They paddled out, Margaux in the bow. It was windy, even cold. For the first time since she had come to the coast she wished she had a jumper.

  Land began to recede. Over her shoulder she saw a line of canoe-keeping men, queued up on shore, frowning.

  The wind tossed wavelets of water into the canoe’s hull, where they pooled, soaking her legs. Margaux paddled on into a darkening sky. Squally clouds hung above the ocean.

  They cleared a headland and were immediately hit by a wall of wind. It tore off Margaux’s hat. Margaux told her to paddle backward.

  She understood they would tip over before it happened. She closed her eyes. The canoe struck her knee, but not hard, before righting itself. She hung on to her paddle. The water was warmer than the air. She stayed immersed. She had to convince herself to surface.

  Margaux was right, it was not deep at all. She stood in the muddy riverbed, waist-deep. Margaux appeared, also upright, still wearing her hat.

  ‘What do you say we head in?’ Margaux said.

  They hauled the canoe to shore. The line of thin men who had waved them off had been replaced by a single figure. He stood to attention rigidly, like a rake. He wore dark jeans, a dark shirt. It was his air, his alert, flexible posture that began to convince her. She stared at him, the blare of recognition louder in her ears as they approached.

  The man turned and walked towards the boatmen’s hut.

  ‘Why don’t you see if you can find us some tea?’

  ‘Sure. What’s up?’

  ‘There’s someone I have to talk to.’

  She walked towards the hut. He stood outside, just under the makuti thatch gutter. She no longer felt that her hair was wet, that she was cold.

  ‘So,’ he said.

  She stopped at a distance from him. ‘Why have you come? I can’t speak here.’ She turned towards the tea stall. ‘See that woman? She’s American. She shouldn’t see you. What are you doing here?’

  ‘One of us saw you, in the town. He told me you were here. Are you working in a hospital?’

  ‘I’m visiting – family.’ She wished immediately that she had not said the word and asked a question to distract him. ‘Why are you here? Gao is a hundred kilometres from here.’

  He looked into her, possibly through her. ‘You must leave the coast.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Many people will be killed.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘And if I don’t leave?’

  ‘You can go to the sea. You get on a boat. There will be no one on the sea.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I came to warn you.’

  She caught him looking intently at her hands. He remembered, perhaps, that she was the person who saved his health if not his life.

  ‘Will you come for me?’ she didn’t say, again. Her chest felt very heavy. Her mouth was flooded with a taste like copper.

  He opened his mouth. She was waiting for what came next. ‘We must pray that not many people are killed.’

  ‘Why have you followed me here?’

  ‘We are all being followed.’

  She sighed, a weak gesture, considering the gravity of the situation. She was so used to playing the role of the harmless doctor she found she could not shake it off.

  ‘I wanted to speak to you.’

  ‘You want to speak to me because I am the only person you have ever saved.’

  As she said this the heaviness in her chest was transforming itself into a strange fatigue. Black curtains of dots, or grains, began to cascade over her eyes. She knew what was happening but could not stop it. The ground embraced her.

  ‘Rebecca, Rebecca.’

  She opened her eyes to see Margaux’s anxious face. ‘Well, thank the Lord, I thought you were gone there.’

  She sat up, slowly.

  ‘I brought you some tea.’

  They
were inside the hut. Someone must have placed her there.

  ‘Do you want me to take you to the clinic? You might have banged your head.’

  ‘You didn’t see me fall?’

  ‘No.’

  She felt her cranium. ‘Put your finger in front of my eyes.’ She touched the tip of Margaux’s finger, then her own nose. ‘Ask me to recite the months of the year in reverse.’

  ‘Tell me the months of the year in reverse.’

  ‘December, November, October…’ She stopped. ‘I’m not concussed.’

  Margaux drove her back to the house. There was no one home, apart from Grace and Michael, who let her in.

  It was dark when she rang the number on the piece of plain card. The phone was off. Fifteen minutes later he called her back.

  ‘I’m sending someone.’ There was an urgency in the voice, a commotion in the background. ‘What you’ve told us is invaluable. You have a chance to save people’s lives.’

  She said, ‘I save people’s lives all the time.’

  VII

  HARTLAUB’S TURACO

  The air of the capital was thin and clogged with diesel. The city sits at 2,000 metres above sea level – high enough to make me light-headed on arrival. The overnight flight from London landed at 6.30am, five minutes after sunrise. As we taxied a red sun rose through a mesh of umbrella thorns. Smoke from charcoal fires hovered in the early morning air, casting a veil over the plateau.

  I was expected at the embassy at 10am. There I would register and receive the credentials needed for my UN transport flight to Gariseb. They’d sent a driver in a black Land Cruiser with red diplomatic plates.

  I was driven through a morning thick with traffic fumes for nearly an hour. We drove past new high-rise apartment complexes built in ovoid shapes; there were so many of these it looked like a city of giant eggs. These new buildings were in the suburbs while the old downtown, the original clot of ox-cart streets, was faded now. There, Samsung air conditioners hummed in rusted cages outside buildings with tired 1950s shopfronts. On the side of the highways there were no pavements, only smooth dirt paths. Along these, neatly suited men and women picked their way to work between puddles and outposts of rubbish. Marabou storks huddled in the grime-coated acacias that lined the main arteries to the city. Welcome to the seat of a new African power blared a billboard, the president’s face emblazoned on it. Behind him, on the backdrop, giraffes and elephants filed across a tangerine plain.