by Jean McNeil
That conflict had been close, this one was closer. She felt the pressure she detected when she first came to the coast but which had abated, floated away from her consciousness on an unceasing circuit of beach parties at Moholo, cocktail receptions, lunches at the yacht club, dhow cruises.
The daily sorties by fighter jets returned. From the Dhow House they could see their faint outlines, high in the sky. They travelled north in the early morning to bomb Al-Nur positions over the border. At dusk different planes flew over, bombers painted in camouflage. The fact that the wheels were down meant they would land nearby, possibly only five or so kilometres away, but when she inquired – to Margaux, to Bill and Julia – where these planes were going, no one knew.
The day dawned cloudy.
‘He could have taken the launch.’ There was a complaint in Lucy’s voice.
‘He just wanted to swim,’ Julia said.
Storm was already in the boat. He had swum there as they had all watched. He was an elegant, effortless swimmer.
Bill started up the outboard motor on the tender and they climbed in. She sat next to Julia, beside a cooler full of white wine and beer. Julia had her hair cut short the previous day, a pageboy haircut that gave her a slant of androgyny. Yet she was so womanly still, with her queenly feet, the thin gold necklaces that encased her throat.
The wind was beginning to turn. Soon they would enter the Matalai, when the wind hesitated between the winter and summer monsoons. The Matalai brought doldrums and uncertain skies, Storm had told her. By November the summer monsoon would establish itself. This wind was born in China, he’d said. It travelled all the way, across India’s triangle to the archipelagos of the Indian Ocean, then the blasted wedge of Saudi Arabia, to reach the coast.
They threaded through mangroves. They would motor out until they were past the reef. There they would hoist the sails. As they rounded a corner to the open ocean they disturbed a caucus of white cattle egret accompanied by a single grey heron. The birds levered themselves into the air. The heron tucked its snake-like neck into its shoulder and floated above them, before flying away.
On the boat, Storm unfurled the sail and the sailboat leaped forward. On shore the sun’s light caught the tops of the casuarinas.
‘Rebecca.’ Storm was staring at her from the prow. ‘I’m going to tack.’
‘What?’ she shouted against the wind.
She felt Lucy’s hand on her shoulder. ‘Tack. Get down.’
They all ducked, touching their foreheads to the deck as the boom swung over.
She looked up to see Storm standing, the sun caught in his driftwood hair. She levered herself carefully to her feet. She couldn’t walk around boats as Storm could, without once touching the gunwale or putting his hand out for balance.
She found she was walking towards him. He gave her a single frightened look. The boat heeled over. She put her hand out and found Storm’s chest, for balance.
‘Sorry.’
‘That’s okay.’
She saw white particles of light, dancing on her eyes.
‘Here, Rebecca. Come sit down.’ Her uncle slid over. ‘You look a bit faint.’
She sat and watched the land became an olive strip on the horizon. Beyond it the sun grazed the green wooded hills of the Estate. Baobabs were silhouetted, so sharp they were stencils. A white-tailed tropicbird sliced the sky.
‘Look.’ She pointed. ‘You almost never see them so close to land.’ But no one seemed to hear.
The wind filled their ears. Storm remained at the tiller. They faced the horizon in silence. Lucy rose and padded expertly to the bow of the boat. She had been on boats since she was a small child, she supposed, and like Storm she did not reach for the riggings or the rail for balance. She folded her body next to her brother’s and sat cross-legged in her bikini and her kikoi.
Julia put her mouth to her ear, to be heard through the wind. ‘They need time together,’ she said. ‘They hardly ever see each other.’
‘But they’ll both be in England soon.’
Julia drew away. ‘You’ll all be in England. But that doesn’t mean you’ll see each other.’
She searched her aunt’s face for censure. Julia wore sunglasses; her lips were pale with sun protector.
She turned her gaze to a parchment sky. The clouds of the Kusi were gone. She felt the presence of the Indian Ocean summer she would never know. Summer on the coast was a different world, Storm had told her, with nights so hot Charlie slept in front of the refrigerator. They heard trumpeter hornbills every day when they came to feed on the berries of the neem trees. Ghost crabs invaded the house and had to be chased from the curtains with a broom. Biting fleas bred in the swimming pool; Storm plucked them out with a kitchen sieve. With the summer came dolphins and Portuguese man-of-war, the jellyfish with a fierce sting and for which the only relief was human urine, applied straight away. ‘It’s a shame you won’t see it,’ he’d said to her. She had hoped he would say something else then, of the order of what she was feeling, an abstract desolation which haunted and frightened her at once – I wish you could stay, I wish we could stay here together, I wish we could have met somewhere else, as something else – but he did not.
When they returned to shore she had two missed calls on her phone, a nameless number with the country’s international dialling code on the screen. As if on cue, it rang again.
‘Rob at Reef Encounters here.’ She heard the American vowels of the Costa Rica sportsfishing T-shirt man who had accosted her. ‘I’ve got a friend coming to the coast to fish. Let’s have a beer. Tomorrow.’
She walked from Moholo to Reef Encounters on the beach. These walks were never the same. Details inserted and erased themselves – the eastern bearded scrub robins posted in the thinnest casuarina braches, calling methodically to each other, the corpuscules of seaweed that popped under feet. Greenshanks scanned the tideline. At the waves’ edge the birds hesitated, bounded back, then scattered into flight. The two black eyes of ghost crabs appeared from holes underneath her feet, then vanished at her approach.
She climbed the stairs from the beach to the deck. At the top step she watched a figure step out from a Range Rover. His paleness shocked her. His very existence. She had forgotten he might be real.
They sat at the table. After the waiter had taken their order he remained still for half a minute, looking at the ocean in that proprietorial way she had observed before in him, as if the ocean were not real, and certainly not a marvel, as if the ocean owed him something.
‘I can’t go back to Gariseb, can I?’
Anthony sighed, almost a fatherly sound.
‘Where do I go?’
‘Home.’
And where is that?
‘I’ve already been relieved of my post, haven’t I?’
‘I told you that was the likely outcome.’ He looked at her. ‘Do you really want to go back?’
She could see a reflection of herself in his sunglasses, retreating, small and wan. Andy, Rafael, Aisha, Aisha’s camel – she would never see them again. They would not be surprised. They would think she was traumatised. That for all her experience, she couldn’t take it.
‘Why are you here?’
‘I have some things to attend to on the coast. You were on my way.’
‘You have bigger fish to fry?’ There was no hurt in her voice. That would be childish. This man was not her father, she reminded herself. In fact he was three years younger than her. Yet he exerted an authority that worked like a spell.
‘He found me by accident. I’m sure of it,’ she said.
‘What did you say to him?’
‘Nothing.’
‘We have them all under surveillance.’
‘What are they planning?’
‘Random attacks. Soft targets – they’ve already done the police barracks and the traffic control cops.’
Soft targets. ‘You mean hotels, private houses.’
‘Probably, but they’re too intent on cre
ating pre-election chaos to go for straight attacks. The coast is the edge of Islam. They’re trying to push the edge further, as far as it can go.’
She remembered this phrase, the edge of Islam, from the briefing he had given her after her evacuation from Gariseb, before she’d boarded the plane for Bahari ya Manda. This was a part of the world which – if you discounted slavery – had seen the peaceful cohabitation of Christians and Muslims since the arrival of the Arab traders in 800 AD. Now all that was about to change. Pop-up mosques had been established up and down the coast, everyone knew, and in the smallest villages women were suddenly pressed to wear headscarves. Tiny boys in kanzus and kofia could be seen walking alongside the road to new Madrassa, their satchels stuffed with the Quran. The edge of Islam was seeping far inland, too, to highland villages where decades before Catholic missionaries from Italy and Ireland had built tin-roofed churches.
‘Can you protect us?’
‘That’s what I’m doing now, here, to the best of my ability. You need to leave.’
‘Aren’t we worth protecting?’
‘It doesn’t work like that. You’re not a head of state. We haven’t got an army stationed here. We are in constant dialogue with upper echelons of government, with the military. No one wants a repeat of the election violence. No one wants an Islamist insurrection. That I can assure you of.’
She recognised the detached note in his gaze, the wanton clarity of it. The cause and effect calculations he made were familiar. They almost reassured her, as if she’d made them herself. The disappointment she felt was personal – it was this that confused her. She realised she had liked Anthony. But this business had nothing to do with liking – a poor, cool word in any case.
‘You should leave now and take the daily flight while it’s still going. Your family needs to go too. Tell them to drive. It’s still possible by road, but in a week’s time I’m not so sure.’ He paused. ‘You’ve done everything you can here.’
‘I haven’t done anything at all. There’s nothing to say. He’s not involved in anything, apart from the banking collapse.’
Anthony gave her a level look. ‘Perhaps that’s the case.’
‘Do you know something you’re not telling me, about my family?’ She was shocked to have used the word, family. How easy the propriety of it sounded in her mouth.
Half an hour later Anthony rose, having delivered the information he had come to give her. They did not shake hands, or say goodbye. She watched him go, in his tropical uniform of beige trousers, a beaded leather belt, light blue shirt. He could be any Englishman down on the coast for business, along with the Italian package tourists, the South African deep-sea fishermen, the German backpackers.
But they were all gone now. The coast was draining – of embassy staff in the highlands, of the United Nations and World Bank people, who had for years come to the coast on weekend breaks in the all-inclusives, had brought their young families to play on the beach. They had been issued directives forbidding them to travel to the coast. Tourists were not forbidden exactly, but found their travel insurance invalidated. Everyone had left, out of fear, apart from the people who belonged here.
At Reef Encounters, at Fitzgerald’s or Baharini, the beach-side bar, the kikoi-wearing barmen apologise, their hands empty. A thin, desperate smile. Hakuna wageni, they say, there are no guests. At Reef Encounters there are three waiters for each customer, who find they can’t finish a bottle of beer without a man in an orange-and-purple shirt swooping in and taking it, mouthfuls sloshing in the bottom. Up and down the coast men selling coconut and women minding stalls selling kikoi and khangas proffer similar pained smiles. Hakuna wageni.
Lucy roared through the gate at the wheel of Julia’s Land Cruiser. ‘They’ve closed the road from Kilindoni,’ she shouted through the window before she even came to a stop.
‘Where have you been?’ Julia barked. ‘Why didn’t you call?’
‘I told you, I went to Tasha’s. How was I supposed to know they were going to put up a bloody roadblock?’ Lucy opened the door and climbed out. ‘It didn’t seem that serious. They didn’t even want money.’
‘That’s when it’s serious,’ Julia said.
She and Lucy stood by the edge of the pool together. On a different day, in a different country, they might have been contemplating going for a swim.
Julia peeled away to tell the servants to stay overnight in the quarters rather than run the roadblocks, even though they all knew they wouldn’t – they had families to get home to, children to feed.
‘Was it really that easy to get through?’
‘It wasn’t hard. Nobody threatened me. It’s interethnic, anyway. I’m not sure how much they care about white people.’
‘White people are an ethnic group in this conflict.’
Lucy peered at her. ‘How would you know?’
‘Because I’m an outsider. These things are obvious to me.’
Lucy dropped her eyes.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I just have this feeling sometimes.’ She raised her eyes. There was a frankness in them she hadn’t seem before. ‘That you know things we don’t. Or you know more about this place than you let on.’
She swallowed. ‘That might be the case. But I haven’t lived here all my life as you have.’ She returned Lucy’s direct look. ‘Do you have any guns in the house?’
‘A couple of rifles somewhere, gathering dust. Why?’
‘I think we should get them.’
‘You can’t be serious.’
‘We need to put Charlie inside. They’ll kill him.’
‘You think people will come here?’ The way Lucy said people, the word emerged a strangled version of itself.
‘Yes, I do. I think they’ll come soon. In the next few days.’
Lucy’s eyes darkened. They were like Claude glass, she thought, those small black mirrors nineteenth-century aesthetes used to carry for parsing landscape. She’d seen an exhibition of them once, in the V&A. Reality had a furtive relationship with Lucy’s eyes; it longed to be reflected in her, yet locked itself away.
Lucy exhaled as if she’d been holding her breath. ‘I knew it.’ She stared at her. ‘You should have told us.’
‘Lucy, I don’t know anything. It’s just I’ve worked in conflict situations. I can feel certain things coming.’
She didn’t reply. ‘I’m going to call Storm.’ Lucy fished in her bag for her mobile, then scowled at her screen. ‘He’s at Evan’s, I guess. It says no signal. That’s weird.’
‘Is there a landline?’
She shook her head. ‘No one has landlines anymore.’
They found two rifles, a .308 and a .375 – hunting rifles, the latter she knew was powerful enough to bring down an elephant – in the store room at the end of the corridor, along with two boxes of ammunition, their cardboard limp with humidity.
‘I need some oil.’ She slid the bolt in and out of the action. It creaked with a thin layer of rust.
Lucy stood back and folded her arms over her chest. ‘How do you know how to fire a gun?’
‘Basic training for field medics.’
‘Have you ever lined up another human being in those sights?’
‘No, but I will if I have to.’
Lucy must have heard something in her voice. Her mouth opened and closed, but no words emerged.
‘I’m going to teach you how to fire the .308. I’ll take the bigger rifle.’ She pointed the barrel to the floor, her hand clamped around the action.
Lucy flickered her eyes towards it. ‘I hate guns.’
‘It’s loaded but I haven’t chambered a round. You don’t need to worry.’
‘So what exactly did they teach you?’
‘Just the basics. The SAS did it. The guys who trained us could have killed any of us in about fifteen different ways.’
‘You’re so… capable. We’re just playboys. Playgirls.’ Lucy laughed, that bright chime of hers.
‘You a
re like me. Or you will be.’
‘I’m not sure I want to be like you.’
She didn’t get a chance to ask Lucy what she meant. The crunch of gravel signalled a car in the drive. Bill was home.
A power cut lingered into the evening. There was no diesel for the generator. She and Julia sat on the baraza, side by side, looking out to sea from a house lit by lamps.
‘Did you know the name the Arabs gave this coast was the Sweet People?’ Julia said. ‘Because the people here could be bought for the price of a piece of candy.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘They carted thousands of people from here to Iraq to be slaves. They mounted a uprising, you know, in Iraq – the Zanj Rebellion. So not so sweet after all.’
Out to sea only two or three lights of fishing boats glinted. The ocean was black lacquer under a thickening moon. She pictured the arrival of a flotilla, a thousand dhows from Arabia come to sell them at market.
Orion hung on the lip of the land. It was coming back, from the south. By summertime – Christmas and New Year – it would hang overhead, its lopsided warrior suspended.
‘The stars look strange tonight, don’t you think?’ Julia stared at the sky. ‘They’re brighter.’
‘It’s because the power’s out. All down the coast, probably.’ The power cut would only affect the houses connected to the shaky grid, houses owned by whites. Africans would carry on with their single kerosene lamps, their makaa braziers. She pictured the coast at that moment from the air: a dark strip next to a taffeta sea, a necklace of small fires hemming its perimeter.
‘You know, I never missed her.’ Julia gave her a barren look. ‘I’m sorry to say that, but it’s true.’
She didn’t know why Julia was speaking like this, now. She might have had a drink. In any case she didn’t want to talk about her mother, now. When she had first arrived in the Dhow House she’d been hungry for her aunt’s memories, for anything at all that would link her to their family. Now she was afraid of what Julia would say about her, about them.