The Dhow House

by Jean McNeil

  ‘She didn’t approve of me marrying here, of what became of me,’ Julia said. ‘She was judgemental, she was political.’ There was an accusation in the word.

  She couldn’t remember her mother being political. Independent, yes, argumentative. Her mother had had a contrary streak she knew she hadn’t inherited, but she did have a certain independence of mind. It struck her that for Julia the two – independence of mind, being political – might be one and the same. That Julia’s analysis would go no further than that: politics was an ornery, wayward application of the mind, one which only those who had no money, or who wanted it, indulged in.

  ‘Your mother believed in making her own way in the world. She couldn’t accept that I’d married a wealthy man. That I expected to stay married to him. The last time I saw her she said, Julia, you’re a trophy wife, and when you’re fifty he’ll just replace you with a younger trophy wife. What will you do then? I said, you don’t understand. You haven’t kept a man. Family is everything for Bill. He will never leave his family, which is to say he’ll never leave me.’ Julia gave a small, rough laugh.

  ‘Did you love him?’

  Julia gave her a blank look.

  ‘Bill. Your husband,’ she added, for measure.

  Julia looked out to sea. Her expression had hardened. In her anger she looked so much like her mother.

  ‘Your mother had no luck.’

  ‘There’s no such thing,’ she said.

  ‘What do you call it, then, what happened to her?’

  ‘I call it what happens.’

  She returned her aunt’s clear gaze. She shook her head, as if to express dismay, which was real, in a sense – a bottomless sense of malady on behalf of her mother, and Julia, and the story she had told herself, the stories we all tell ourselves, insistently, until they are required reading.

  After dinner they went to bed early. Storm had not come home. He would stay at Evan’s, Lucy said, after dinner when Grace was clearing the food away. He’d left it too late to drive home in any case. The curfew had been brought forward the day before. Now everyone apart from police, army and the long-distance lorries had to be off the roads by 10pm.

  She slept for two hours, then woke, then slept again. The house groaned in the wind. From the beach she heard the trill of curlews. She rose and looked out the window. There was no moon, no familiar lights of the fishing dhows that trawled by night for shark and filusi beyond the reef’s edge.

  The second time she woke, she was out of bed and on her feet in a second, running, fully clothed – she had gone to sleep in shorts, a T-shirt, her running shoes beside her bed.

  It was just as she expected: the sound of wheels on the gravel, Charlie barking, the crisp retort of gunshot, Charlie silenced. Not even a whine.

  She lunged into the closet, grabbed the guns. She ran to Storm’s bedroom and flung it open. His empty bed answered her.

  Lucy was in her room, awake. Get up, she hissed. Get dressed. Then Julia and Bill. It’s me, she called, before she opened the door. Then, as if this was not enough. It’s Rebecca.

  They appeared at the door, their faces unusually pale in the dark. ‘Rebecca, what’s that in your hand?’ Julia said.

  ‘Stay here. Don’t move. Don’t resist.’

  Her aunt and uncle didn’t question her. They didn’t understand, yet, what was happening.

  The house knew. The house had not let them in. The alarm system was yet to blare, the heavy wooden door stood firm. The house had been waiting for this all along, ever since it was built. It did not shudder against their onslaught. It shrank back, demure and withholding, ready to guard its honour.

  But now three men stood in the living room, their faces covered with dark scarves. Their eyes glittered.

  ‘What are you going to do with that?’ his voice said. ‘Did they train you?’

  She stared back at them.

  He made a small gesture to the men he emerged from, just like that day in Gariseb, materialising out of their bodies. The others were more robust than him yet they deferred to him, subtly. She saw the right hand of one of these men twitch. He was not accustomed to staying still.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You must leave the coast. The Kufir cannot live here.’

  ‘You will never evict them,’ she said. ‘There are too many.’

  To be talking to him again felt strangely calming. There was no reaction, either from him or the men who flanked him.

  A noise erupted. She couldn’t tell where it came from. She swivelled her head to where her uncle stood at the top of the stairs. His shirt was loose from his trousers. His face had a pallor. In the dark it was the dingy grey of the jahazi sail.

  The noise was not the shot, which was nearly soundless, but its ricochet. One man lurched sideways – it was he who had fired the shot, the one she returned, on muscle memory. She will not remember shouldering, or firing. The men were running backward in the house, towards its open door, dragging the man she had hit. Ali was invisible – where was he? She looked behind, to the top of the stairs. Her uncle was upright, but something was wrong.

  Rebecca.

  It seemed to take a long time, this glance, or look, over her shoulder. She saw her aunt trying to hang on to her uncle, his shirt ruched underneath her arm. Julia was bent over him, her fair hair and slight frame, her blonde hair folded over his face. Then her uncle was on the floor at the top of the stairs.

  They covered the hundred kilometres between Kilindoni and Bahari ya Manda in an hour, in a private ambulance with its purple flashing lights.

  From the window of the ambulance she saw the sky pale into dawn. Outside the city were grassy, sodden rice fields. African sacred ibis nudged through them. The birds were black and white with a mask on their faces. Ibis were probers, she remembered, their straw-like beaks suction small creatures, fungi, moisture from the grass. At sunrise the ibis took flight in a stately elevation.

  By dawn the outskirts of the city were awake. Men in kanzus walked accompanied by women in black buibuis, their hems brushed with dust. A wooden cart drawn by oxen was piled with green bananas. The oxen shuffled down the road as intercity buses streamed by them. There was not an angle in the town from which the sea was not visible. The grey wedge of a supertanker devoured the horizon. Bahari ya Manda’s was the best natural harbour on the coast. A ten-storey ship could park next to a cashew nut kiosk, where it would overlook the battements of the crumbling fort built by the Portuguese five hundred years before.

  The ambulance driver veered into a wide road lined by mango trees. This was the suburb where all the expats lived, near to the international school and the private hospital run by the Aga Khan.

  Beside her, Bill was conscious, although sedated. He tried to rise from time to time. His eyes sought out hers, his mouth forming and reforming words. She offered her doctor’s reassurances. Be quiet, don’t strain yourself. You have to rest. Then, just as they pulled up at the Emergency entrance, she heard him clearly. I understand, Rebecca, he whispered, over and over. I understand.

  The hospital’s cement floors were polished to a dark, translucent onyx. A warm wind that carried the tang of the sea blew down its corridors. Latticed sections of its coral frame were open to the air.

  Julia and Lucy were slumped on chairs in the corridor. She was talking to the trauma doctor when Storm walked in.

  ‘Where have you been all night?’

  Julia cast a look at her. This was her question, by rights.

  ‘At Evan’s.’

  Storm’s voice was hollow. He sounded half himself. ‘Why didn’t you call me?’

  Lucy answered for her. ‘We forgot about you.’ Her lips pulsed with a flickering distrust.

  Storm walked out of the dim corridor and disappeared into the white blare of sunlight at its end. They all watched him go. He did not look back.

  The drive from Bahari ya Manda was a negative copy of the one they had made in the middle of the night two days before. Now the driver ov
ertook languidly. Julia sat in front, holding voluble conversations about the increasing price of water and petrol with him. She watched as Julia gesticulated emphatically but abstractly, unable to hear her words over the rush of air through the windows as she called people on her mobile and conducted terse, animated conversations as she made plans for the funeral.

  Zebu cows grazed next to the road. Goats and their child pursuers clattered on the half-weeded paths on the shoulder of the road. She thought she saw a bat hawk slice the air, swooping from a tree to an electricity line on the other side of the road.

  She missed the ordinary life of the road, which had vanished with the crisis, the mango baskets and jute bags of makaa stationed along the road, the Saturday markets, with their piles of clothing set out on the ground on burlap bags, smoke from mahindi cooking, the men who walked by the side of the road, shirts rippling in the wake of buses and trucks streaming past them. She even missed the policemen who waited in the shade next to invisible speed bumps, or the motorcycle taxi drivers who flung themselves headlong onto the road without looking in an attempt to die young.

  A village wedding had gone ahead despite the lockdown, she saw. They passed its tottering marquee and morose-looking guests sitting on plastic chairs with their elbows on their knees, music hurling from a hastily erected pyramid of speakers that looked as if it would collapse before the end of the day. She saw the thin minarets of mosques painted mint and apricot, the maze of roadside shambas and their cargo of bitter kale and pumpkin.

  Her uncle was gone. She tried to absorb the fact. The bullet had hit his shoulder. He would have been back to normal within a month. But his heart rebelled against the intrusion. The heart attack happened as he was being prepped for theatre. Bill would have had no idea he had a heart condition. It was not at all uncommon that such conditions went undiagnosed. Left-dominant arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy, the doctor at Bahari ya Manda had confirmed. She had studied it but never diagnosed it in a patient. They had tried adrenalin, the defibrillator, even CPR. She watched from the back of the theatre, feeling increasingly desperate. She knew – she would think this later – that he was not going to respond. Sometimes you just knew.

  She felt pity for him, also a nameless emotion that panicked her if she approached it. She took refuge in ordinary shame. It was an armed robbery attempt, insurgents looking for loot, that was all. It had all happened so fast and it had been as violent as she had feared, but neither had she been convinced it would really happen. She had thought she could protect them. And if she couldn’t, that she would save them.

  They passed the saline flats of mangroves. Giant egrets perched in their branches, looking out to sea. The mudflats shone like slate. The coast gets under your skin, Margaux’s voice floated to her, an uncharacteristically sentimental pronouncement she made one of those nights at Reef Encounters. You want to get away, you say it’s too hot to think, nothing ever happens here, but then as soon as you leave you start planning to return.

  They turned off at the Estate road, whose entrance was flanked with two pickup trucks of armed security guards. They passed the signs for Oleander House, Zanj Mansion. Margaux was right; the coast was an anesthetic. For a while, it had been possible to forget oneself here, along with the world, and history. But Ali and Al-Nur had returned history to its shores. History had rediscovered this somnolent backwater. It would prod it into the now.

  They passed through the gate of the house. On either side the servants were lined up, hands pressed together, faces drawn. As the car came to a halt she began to hear a low murmur. They were chanting a single word, so low it was almost under their breath: Pole.

  A mound of freshly dug earth marked where Charlie the dog lay. Storm must have been there and had buried him. On his grave was a bouquet of bougainvillea. Lucy got out of the car and went to stand over the fresh earth. Julia shot out of the passenger seat and into the house.

  She hesitated on the drive. Lucy’s eyes were hidden behind sunglasses. Her cheeks were stained with dried tears.

  ‘Aren’t you coming in, Rebecca?’

  She followed Lucy into the house. In the kitchen Julia stood with her back against the breakfast bar. She gave them a plain look. ‘I have so much to do.’

  Storm was there. He had been waiting near the infinity pool.

  ‘The man,’ he said. ‘What did you say to him?’

  ‘I told him not to harm the family. That no good would come of it.’

  ‘Did you know they were coming?’ Storm said.

  ‘You weren’t even here.’ Lucy’s face was ashen.

  Storm ignored her. ‘Why do you speak Arabic?

  ‘I have to, for my work. I’ve worked for five years in Arabic-speaking countries.’

  She looked at Julia. Her thought was that her aunt might do something – take the whole thing away with a wave of her hand, with the demure diamond wedding ring that clutched her fourth finger. But Julia’s eyes were glossy. Her gaze was pitched over and beyond them, out to sea.

  Storm had not looked at her – really looked at her – since she had arrived. She sought him out, tried to find his eyes. He had turned away. He no longer looked like himself, or he did, but like an effigy, a statue that had been abandoned in the rain.

  This is what you get, the voice inside her head savage, for the first time in months, for having anything to do with him. He is a boy. Her rage was so close to the surface of her skin she worried it would spill out through her eyes.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Julia said, finally. She was relieved to hear the authority in her aunt’s voice. ‘Rebecca has nothing to do with any of this.’

  They stood in the living room in a triangle: her, Storm, Lucy, angled towards Julia, who now stood in front of them, who was not the same woman they had known until only two days before. It was hard to know what had changed. A hollow grandeur had taken up residence. But there was something else, indefinite, which was not engineered by grief.

  Julia walked across the living room, towards the pool. She wore patchwork linen trousers and silver thong sandals with little wings on their straps, where they clutched her ankles. She walked into the garden. They watched as a trio of Amani sunbirds unruffled themselves from the neem tree and hovered for a moment in the air. They followed Julia to the edge of the garden, before shooting up into the sky in a flash of a second. They watched the birds disappear into the air.

  At five thirty the sun is levering itself out of the sea over the horizon, somewhere near Zanzibar. The dugongs and green turtles move beneath its mantle, wading through olive depths where the sun never penetrates. In smooth pockets of coral leopard cowries wink and close their single eye against the day.

  Today she will run on the beach. It is her thirty-eighth birthday. She has told no one in the house. Such things are irrelevant now.

  They are all leaving. In two days’ time Julia will fly to the capital with Bill’s body. Storm and Lucy will drive, a seven-hour journey. Tomorrow she will fly to the capital, and then take a flight to London. She knows now there will be no visit to the embassy in the suburbs, and no return to Gariseb.

  She runs in the semi-darkness, a head torch affixed to her forehead. The sky is lightening quickly. She wants to be away, to be somewhere she can be innocent again. But she fears her departure, too. After the next twenty-four hours she may never be in the same room as Storm again. She will never be able to put out her hand and encounter the edges of his body.

  The beach is empty. Not even the nocturnal spear-fishermen with their buckets full of live wounded octopus are there.

  Bill’s face hovers in her mind. She can see him in Storm’s face now. For some reason she could not point to the resemblance while he was alive. Their likeness is in the shape of his eyes, which Storm has inherited, those glass-blue eyes that look upon the world so searchingly at times, for someone who has never been tested.

  She wants to greet the day with resolve and exertion. She runs where the sand is soft, so that she has to work harder.
Cloud presses in. In another minute a squall has drifted over her and she is soaked through. She will keep going, because it is her birthday, and to turn away from the storm would be to gainsay the year, to live under a mantel of cowardice and lack of resolve, of failure. She keeps running, into the force of the storm as it engulfs the coral islets of the coast in its murk, into the next year of her life.

  For the whole of her last day in the house they skirted each other. They were bound by an unspoken pact not to all be in the same space at once.

  She barely saw Storm. All day Lucy did not emerge from her room. She saw Grace mount the stairs with a tray of tea and toast. Julia was always on the phone. As soon as she put it down she had text messages from people who had to be rung. Friends of Bill’s arrived at the door and sat on the stools around the breakfast counter, staring into space.

  In the evening the kitchen was still full of mourners. She went to her room and lay down. Her state of being was entirely unfamiliar to her. She felt sluggish but alarmed, tired but awake.

  There was a knock on her door. She thought it might be Lucy. Of all of them, she might say goodbye to her. Her intention was to melt out of the house the following day, as if she had never been there. She had considered leaving before dawn, for them to discover her room empty, but this seemed too obvious an admission of guilt.

  She rose from the bed and opened the door. She stared into his eyes and saw something raw and silent there. He stepped back from the door. She understood from his eyes that she should follow him.

  In the darkened corridor they slinked through slats of light. The moon had risen early and was nearly full. From the kitchen came a murmur of voices.

  She followed him to his room, closing the door behind her. He sat down on the bed and did not look at her.

  A burning, a cold fire, took hold inside her. She was faint. She hadn’t eaten properly in two days.

  For some months afterward she will not be able to approach what happens next. The memory has been sealed in a ring of fire.