by Jean McNeil
Our cocktail glasses were empty. ‘Forgive me if this sounds like I’m making a last-ditch attempt,’ he began, ‘but we’re both about to be stuck in the middle of nowhere for six months, and—’
‘And it would be a shame to lose the opportunity.’
I could find nothing to say against this affable, nearly handsome man. In London I might have plucked up enough courage for it. On the third date we would have gone to bed. On the sixth date he would have been posted to Myanmar.
‘Well.’ I rose and offered him my hand. ‘Good luck. The DRC is tough, everyone says. You seem like a good person.’
He grimaced.
‘You’ve heard that before?’
‘It’s a killer, that one.’ He laughed lightly, a little dismissively. ‘But you seem resolved.’
‘Well. Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight.’
He would have a whisky, he said, at the bar, beside the slim goddesses who had begun to appear next to the men in clever suits and pointed-toe brogues. I took a last glance at him as I walked towards the lifts. He was sitting on a stool, chatting amiably to the bartender. He had got a taste for the expat life, he’d told me. He was thirty-four, unmarried, and his life was entirely open – those were his words. He would return to London and meet a girl from Cheltenham Ladies’ College in a Marylebone cocktail bar, he would be posted to South Africa and meet the cultural programmer for the Goethe Institute at a Mail and Guardian literary festival event, he would marry a Congolese woman and start a local NGO specialising in scoping projects for HIV, for TB, for child soldier rehabilitation. I would never see him again.
The next day I was driven to the airport in a similar car, to a side entrance, a departure point used only by UN, military and diplomatic personnel. In the airport were tall south Sudanese men travelling to the regional security conference in Djibouti and British Army lieutenants heading to the not-so-secret army base in the north, near the famous elephant sanctuary. I would be one of them, this nomadic tribe of international salvage experts. I would rue the fact that I had left the ordinary world. I would watch the tourists just arrived from the UK with their straw hats board planes to the coast. Julia and her family lived there, in a place I had a rough holiday brochure image of, hotels and beaches and hot, chaotic cities choked with tuk-tuks and minibuses, but I had no plan to contact them. We would remain unknown to each other. I would come and go from their country under their noses, undetected, invisible even, a ghost.
VIII
AFRICAN SACRED IBIS
Delphine’s last day in the house was one of storms. They powered in from the ocean, dark Kusi squalls. White birds keeled around Tern Island, screeching in the wind. The dark and pensive grove of palm trees on the other side of the road from the entrance to the house was lashed by rain.
The rest of the family milled about the house uncertainly, waiting to say goodbye. This energy – a stalled expectation, a sense that at any moment some sort of rupture would need to be confronted – had established itself in the house only a day or two ago, and now felt unmovable.
‘I don’t know why she doesn’t take a boy with her,’ Julia said. Julia meant the part-time gardener-cum-carpenter, Marcus, who must have been fifty. ‘She’s bound to run into trouble on the road.’
‘Tell her, then,’ she said.
‘Me, tell Delphine how to drive in Africa?’ Julia laughed.
Meanwhile Delphine stalked the plazas of the house. She got in her car and roared to the petrol station in Kilindoni, stocking up on jerry cans of petrol and water and provisions for her journey. It would take her twenty hours to drive home with all the roadblocks.
Now that Delphine was leaving, she felt safe enough to observe her. She was an ectomorph – lean and yet delicate. Her ascetic physique furnished her with drama even as it siphoned her of warmth. She was restless, always, sitting down only to stand up, clicking her fingers for the staff to help carry her things to the car. Delphine must have had lovers, she considered, perhaps many. To a man she must appear as a vault whose code was exceedingly difficult to crack.
The previous night at dinner she had found herself subjected once more to Delphine’s lighthouse gaze. Julia had put her next to Storm at the table and she had spent the dinner trying to drown out the roar of his body by conversing to everyone else, by drinking too much. She was clumsy and brash, she dropped her knife twice. Each time Julia had winced.
Delphine had been telling a story about her last photographic safari. ‘I was in Botswana a couple of months ago,’ Delphine said. ‘I was guiding a National Geographic photographer deep into the delta. We were on horseback for part of it. One of the horses was attacked by a lion.’ Delphine paused to accept a refill of her wine glass.
‘What did you do?’ she asked.
Delphine fixed her with that rigid stare of hers. ‘I shot it. I’d been wanting to try out my new .458 from horseback for a while. I got it in one shot. Brain.’ Delphine folded her napkin into two sharp panels. ‘I left the carcass. Wild dogs, hyena, they came that night. We could hear them squabbling over her.’
The anecdote silenced them all, which is perhaps what it had been designed to do. They hung their heads like penitents and finished their dinner. In the lull that followed she found her eye drawn to Bill, then to Delphine, back and forth, comparing them. How much they were sister and brother. Their heads had the same sharp slope from the crown to the back of their necks, as if they had been planed off.
She imagined Delphine’s alternate English self, had her and Bill’s grandparents stayed on their farm in Gloucestershire instead of adventuring in the tropics. She might be an angular Home Counties trophy wife, shopping at Boden and the White Store, drinking slimline tonic. There, she would have been hard and brittle, but Africa had given her a carnivorous grandeur.
‘I see you two have made friends,’ Delphine said.
She stiffened. Storm answered. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘When you’re in the house together you are always looking to see where the other is.’
‘Like impala,’ he said. ‘Safety in numbers.’
‘More like klipspringer,’ Delphine said, ‘which mate for life.’
Julia had given them a bright, puzzled look. Then Bill’s phone had rung, and the moment was dispersed.
Delphine left at eleven o’clock. They had all been up early that morning, and it felt as if it had lasted for ever. As they waved her off, Delphine had called Julia over to the car. Their heads had dipped towards each other for a minute. Then Julia had drawn away. She couldn’t see her aunt’s face, but her posture had changed. She held herself carefully, as if she’d just been issued a warning.
It rained all afternoon. She liked the rain. Clear skies were exposure. She found protection in these woolly afternoons when the land and the sea were held inside cloud. The rain was unlike anything she had experienced. It didn’t come in sheets or storms, it didn’t seem to actually fall from the sky. Instead the rain seemed to be dimensionless, generated inside the air. Surely no harm could happen in its hush, the afternoons it thickened to instant night.
The rain made geckoes dive behind picture frames and spiders fall asleep in their webs. In her room she saw the ocean enveloped in a curtain of mist. The bougainvillea hung its head as if ashamed. The air smelled of metal. The house also shifted personality on these wet Kusi afternoons, it became hushed and eternal.
She fell asleep for over an hour and struggled to rouse herself. At seven o’clock she went down into the living room and walked outside. It was nearly dark. The monkeys were already asleep in the neem tree; she saw their small bulks, how they nestled close, faces buried in each other’s chests.
She walked one circuit of the infinity pool, then two, three, until she had paced for nearly an hour. The moon swung over the ocean, where it carved a silver streak. The slender-tailed nightjar called, whirr-whirr, whirr-whirr, a purring small machine. She loved nightjars, their soft eyes like crushed blackberries.
Her eye caught a light at sea. She grabbed the binoculars. They were likely out on the boat, Storm and Evan. They went fishing at night now and then, he’d told her, when the tide was right. She had watched them carefully since the night she’d seen them together in the living room. She felt guilty about her spying, however inadvertent. What lingered in her mind was a single image of fine, dark fingers in Storm’s hair. Depending on the angle this picture took it was an emblem of the easy friendship of young men, or something charged with almost abstract lust. If this were true, she felt less panicked than if he were with another woman. She didn’t know why, only that most men were attracted to other men on some level, she judged; this was their true nature. Women were just a diversion.
She went back inside the house. Her uncle sat on the baraza. She hadn’t heard a car in the drive.
‘Julia.’ There was question mark at the edge of the name. ‘Oh, Rebecca, it’s you. What were you doing out there?’
She took a seat opposite him on the baraza. ‘Listening to the slender-tailed nightjar. Do you know how they catch their prey?’
He gave a diffident shake of his head.
‘They have tetrachromatic eyesight; they see in long, medium and shortwave dimensions. They also see UV light.’
‘We could all use better vision,’ he said. A weight had settled inside him. This was what worry did to people, she thought.
The man sitting across from her was still vital, in the prime of life, really. He had expected to enjoy living off the fruits of his labour, but now he was facing the worry of his children’s safety, the prospect of not seeing them for many months, having to flee the Dhow House, the coast and its life of ease for the cold city. Although fleeing one house for another was not necessarily a tragedy.
‘Is Storm here?’
‘No, he’s out on the boat.’
‘With Evan.’ He shook his head. ‘Those two are inseparable.’
She said it before she even thought it. ‘They love each other.’
‘We all loved each other. We had friendships like that, when I was young. Me and my best friend Dennis spent hours together walking the farm, shooting guineafowl. We went to school together, we went on holiday with each other’s families. We were never apart. Other people then were everything. We had no distractions.’ He paused. ‘Men don’t have friendships like that anymore. Why is that?’
‘Because it’s assumed to be something else.’
He laughed. His voice swung on a hinge, hesitating between pleasantry and mockery, she had observed. The hinge could swing either way. His volatility had the effect of keeping everyone in his realm hooked, uncertain, eager the wind-blown door of his mood should veer in their favour. The family had different strategies for dealing with her uncle when he was like this, she had observed – Julia mollified, Storm avoided, Lucy loved, showering her father in hugs.
‘And you, have you ever had a friend like that?’
Her uncle’s face was impassive, affable as always. But there was a glint of irony in his voice.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Unfortunately not.’
‘But you have had – relationships.’
‘One serious one. With a helicopter pilot. He died.’
Her uncle did not offer any comfort. He merely nodded.
‘You must find life very lonely, then.’
‘I’m alright. I have my work.’
They looked at each other. She might have imagined it, but something pure – some understanding – passed between them.
She got to her feet, powered by a sudden conviction. She couldn’t take any more of Africa. She wanted to be back in her own country, she wanted to be somewhere things worked. She wanted to be back in her sphere of power, and not beholden to circumstance.
Her uncle might have sensed the storm that had flashed through her. ‘You must find it tedious here, without lives to save.’
His eyes burned into her. She turned. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’
The eyes stayed with her as she ascended the spiral staircase. She shook them off only when she closed the door to her room. For a while she could hear him moving about downstairs in the living room – the creak of the fridge door opening, the rattle of ice.
She sat on the bed. Her breathing finally slowed. Bill had meant to accuse her of something, but what? He would not be plain about it. No, he wanted to see her put under pressure, see what she would do.
She had been waylaid by his charm. Storm was not his father. He was not charming, which she associated with vanity in any case. He was not as conflicted as his father, but he had force. It was beyond charisma or sexual magnetism. She had never seen its like before, although she had felt a similar current, more brutal, emanating from some of the army officers she had met. A force that can subtract the qualities that dog her – her dismissal of fear, her fastidiousness – a force which has the ability to return her to her quiet, courageous self. Storm’s danger provoked her valour. Maybe that is the truth of it: it was all wrong, but she believed that she was a better version of herself with him. No one else could have effected such a transformation.
The wind picked up. The tide flung waves at the edge of the shore. The sound of their breaking boomed in her ears.
Here she was in the house, her uncle downstairs, two solitudes at the helm of night. They were out there, an isosceles triangle, pointed at one another: Storm and Evan on the boat, Lucy at a friend’s house, Julia god knew where. She felt its presence suddenly, the alternate quadrant of fate where they might never have met, let alone been family. Where they could all be strangers.
Morning sun coated the fronds of the coconut and golden palms Julia had planted in ceramic pots. The garden glimmered against the blue froth of the ocean. The yellow-rumped tinkerbird whirred in the trees.
Julia was in the kitchen, her hands busy with commands to Grace. ‘Time goes so quickly. You never have time to do all the things you want to.’
Julia’s eyes glistened with sudden tears. It was the first time she had seen her aunt cry. Julia’s face held its composure. Her own mother’s face had become distorted and ugly, on the few times she had seen her cry.
‘I hate this feeling of the future closing in,’ Julia said. ‘My children are always leaving me. From the moment they were born they’ve been leaving.’
She didn’t know what to say. She had no experience with such an emotion. When she had left her mother to go to university, she had only felt relief.
She watched Julia move back and forth. Her distress made her restless. She was wearing a pair of white shorts and a green T-shirt. Her nails were painted silver. She had seen her every day for nearly two months, but even now she found new angles and details to her aunt’s being – her demure feet, her thin shoulders, the swan-like curve of her neck. Her lovely porcelain face was not fragile, as such a quality would have been for many women, but expressed a broken bravado. She felt reassured by her beauty. Perhaps that was why so many strove to obtain beautiful people: their perfection soothed the world’s ills. Most people could be reduced to a predominant element, she thought: air, water, fire, earth. Julia was air, Storm was water, her uncle was fire. What was she?
‘It’s our last chance to go out as a family,’ Julia was saying. ‘I want it to be perfect.’
Now her aunt paced the open living room of the house. She hesitated, wondering what to do. Julia was not a person who encouraged hugs, or gestures of solidarity at all. She couldn’t muster the resolve to ask her the questions or suggest remedies as she would have of anyone else.
She pictured her aunt in all those years she did not know her – driving the children to school, organising charity fashion shows, her short-lived enterprise of making leather bags for export, her painting and photography classes, her attempts to maintain an innate gift. She would have been a good photojournalist. She would have lived more briefly perhaps, but each moment of her life would have been engraved on her like scripture, instead of these years she has spent waiting in paradise
.
She perceived that something inside Julia was coming to its terminus, a spiritual rather than physical entity. Julia knew this intuitively but did not know its cause, which had something to do with her, Rebecca, with her infiltration of their lives. Julia must have scented her guilt, was suspicious of it, but recoiled from her own doubts. Suspicions could have little place in families, if you wanted them to survive.
Election Day Three Weeks. Countdown to the Future. Will Blood be Spilled? The newspapers seemed to exist only to stoke fear. But there was a countdown involved. The country was collectively holding its breath. Would a repeat of the violence that marred the election four years previously take place? Would the Milau people run the risk of being killed at roadblocks while driving from the capital to the Larsha Hills, as had happened before? Would the smell of burning rubber and the sight of young men with scarves wrapped around their faces as improvised balaclavas be repeated?
Flights to London, Dubai and Istanbul were full of foreigners leaving the country. The oil executives, Food and Agriculture Programme administrators, the Third Commercial Secretaries of the embassies of Eastern European countries among them. But no doctors, she supposed. Doctors – at least, those of her tribe – were the last to leave. They went down with the ship.
Al-Nur Close In on the Coast. Islamists had entrenched cells in Puku, in Lindi, in Bahari ya Manda, the papers reported. We now control the coast all the way to Mozambique, they claimed. In Bahari ya Manda, motorcycle assassins patrolled the streets and shot an Australian tourist at close range as he queued to board a ferry. Fifteen men, all Milau and Christian, were taken out of a long-distance bus travelling from Puku to Bahari ya Manda and shot by the roadside as vehicles streamed past.
In the north the Bora continued their advance into territory so recently annexed to give a home to their rivals, the Nisa. Gariseb was fifty kilometres from the border of the annexed territory. Close enough to Gao and Port Al-Saidi – this accident of geography is what brought Ali and his men to her IV drip, after their successful rout of the Bora only a hundred kilometres from the hospital.