by Jean McNeil
She sits down next to him. She knows she should not be there, that he perhaps hates or fears her, but she finds she has entered an infantile state. She has regressed. She can’t move. She needs to be only a body now. There is nothing else she wants to be.
She can’t breathe. For some reason her breaths can’t come fast enough. She puts her head between her legs, her knees press on her ears. For a second she considers closing them and crushing her head, as in a vice. When she rises he is looking at her. He wants to feel compassion, she sees, but really he just wants it to stop.
They are so disoriented, and she so exhausted from hyperventilating, that they make the mistake, for the first time, of falling asleep in his bed.
She has a dream that his father is dying. Storm gives him the kiss of life, pinching his nose, tilting his head back and blowing through his airway. Then it is her turn. She puts her lips over Bill’s, stretching her mouth to avoid his lips. But Bill is dead. His hair is beginning to lose its sheen. They turn to each other and continue the kiss of life. They are kissing, his father’s corpse between them.
This is how his Julia finds them in the morning.
She woke, up and up, as if surfacing from a great depth, gasping for air.
What are you doing? He is a child! He is your cousin!
Julia had been brought back to life. She was above her now, a towering blond god.
Why? Julia’s eyes were black and scorched.
The three of them had levitated downstairs. She would not remember getting from the bedroom to her room, where she must have grabbed her backpack containing her passport, leaving her bag with all her other possessions under the bed.
Lucy was among them, wild-haired, just woken up by the shouting. What’s happening? What’s going on?
She said this over and over, but no one heard her.
Ask him who he loves? Ask him!
She would not remember the blow, but she would remember that suddenly she was on her knees. Then, like a sprinter, she was up and running.
It was eight o’clock. Already the heat was thick. The askaris sat in their security huts outside empty houses and watched her go, thinking it was an ordinary run. They had seen her before in the mornings on these dusty roads. She was the only moving thing the watchmen would see that day. There were few cars; the buses had been suspended.
She ran past Oleander House and Zanj Mansion. They were empty, their swimming pools already choked with mbambakofi leaves. In the fields of the Estate Klass’ cuckoo called its plangent song, Won’t you come? Won’t you come? A lament, perhaps, for all those mornings on the coast when the days had dawned golden with tourists and money. She ran with her passport in one hand and her phone in the other, although it threatened to slip out of her grip with sweat. No vehicle came to follow her, or to return her to the house. There was the day, the heat congealing, a heron flying with its neck tucked in, wings pounding the air. Behind her, the Dhow House was affronted by her sudden departure, but also satisfied. It closed its eyes and turned to face the sea.
IX
NORTHERN CARMINE BEE-EATER
‘Something is keeping them apart.’
Daniel squints into the early morning sun. We stare into the branches of the brachystegia forest, which dissolve against the sky. The Fisher’s turacos have flown away.
I am not used to the heat anymore. I am covered in a thin film of sweat. The forest bubbles with sound around us. Green barbet, forest batis, golden pipit – the small, secretive birds of the coast. Many of them are endangered. Some species, like the Sarara river cisticola, have not been observed in forty years and are thought to be extinct.
By nine o’clock the birds have quietened. Daniel and I walk side by side down one of the sandy roads just outside the protected forest. It is fenced, to keep the elephant from trampling the crops of the villagers who live nestled against its perimeter, but also in a vain attempt to keep poachers out. As we walk Daniel stops, ducks into the holes that have been clipped in the fence’s wire, shakes a tree or rattles the undergrowth, and emerges with green wire in his hand.
‘Snares,’ he says. ‘They are eating the sifaka duiker to extinction.’
Daniel has lived and worked in this forest all his life. He knows it better than anyone alive. ‘Before, the elephant were never threatened. Now they are killed for their tusks, which are almost worthless anyway, they are so small.’ Daniel has come across the forest elephant many times when walking. ‘They are very shy, they vanish into the forest.’
Beyond the fence the forest is a mesh of lianas, of ferns and brambles and parasitic bromeliads. Tiny amphibians suck on their moisture, curled on gold haunches. Daniel finds one for me. ‘Pygmy golden forest frog,’ he announces.
We find his motorcycle, which he had stashed in a mesh of trees so that it would not be stolen. We hop on and drive the loamy road which takes us to the coastal highway.
There we pass light-blue-shirted-policemen dozing under mango trees. Jute bags of makaa line the road. Motorcycle taxis driven by an army of thin young men wearing oversize sunglasses carry women in red-and-green khangas, yellow plastic water-carriers, baskets of fruit. The smell of the sea is never far away.
Daniel drops me at the crossroads. From here I will get a minibus back to Kilindoni. We say goodbye.
‘Thank you.’ He takes my payment, and sees my tip. ‘Bless you,’ he adds.
I wave him goodbye, this grandfather on a motorcycle. The next time I see him again – if there is a next time – he will squint at me. He will not remember. He will say, with that admonishing giggle of his, ‘All white people look the same.’
At the Kilindoni Club not enough time has passed for the faded sign to be painted, with its yellowing cattle egrets nosing through mangroves. The seller of stale peanuts, three teeth in his mouth, is still outside the entrance though, still waving, calling after me, Mama; rafiki, mama; rafiki.
Not enough time has passed for me to feel this place is foreign or exotic. Although there have been two and a half years in the interim – years of emergency rooms, night shifts, serums and injections, the neat cavities of gunshot wounds, the tear of knives renting skin in A&E departments that increasingly resemble triage stations for alcoholics. On Friday and Saturday nights, men in football jerseys sit slumped between echocardiograms and water coolers, waiting for the friends they have borne to the hospital after last orders, casualties of a weekly war.
I glimpse myself in the mirror here, putting on or taking off my swimsuit. In this country the most defining feature of my existence is my colour. Ivory, albumen, sickly pale. White woman; white woman ageing rapidly; white woman thinking there is still time. Here the heat congeals time, delivers it to you like a gelatinous soup and says, drink. I catch myself anticipating the next moment: the moment when I will have a cold beer, the moment when I will bask in unreflective happiness. We live in a state of constant anticipation. Time is a surprise delivered in moment-sized parcels.
I feel more alive here. Many people do, in African countries where life is not yet governed by the delusion that we can control everything. Africa is dangerous and people of my kind, people who have been brought up in relative safety, gorge themselves on the elixir of sudden disruption. I am enlivened by its detail – goats grazing on garbage, the milky sludge of open latrines, the signs announcing free fresh water – maji ya bure – dispensed at mosques. Here I am jolted by a thousand injustices every day.
I go running on the same road as I did before but stop short of Oleander House and Zanj Mansion. The same askaris come leaping towards me, having finished the night shift, raising their spears and clicking the heels of their rubber sandals in the air. They shout in Swahili: Keep going, sister! In the Usimama supermarket I queue behind a blond woman in a green dress. I stare at her neck, her cheek, until a slice of her cheekbone reveals it is not Julia. She divides her time between Durban and Mozambique now, Lucy told me. Bill left her more than enough money to buy a house in a suburb of the city frequented by
surfers and black mambas. ‘You have to be careful they don’t breed under the swimming pool,’ Lucy said. She meant the snakes, not the surfers.
Lucy didn’t tell me where Storm was and I didn’t ask. He could be in London, working for one of his father’s business associates, or living on his legacies. The country’s whites often scatter to South Africa or Australia. They gravitate to places of warmth and beauty. Understandably.
Lately the whites are not welcome. The president of the republic has discovered the advantages of anti-colonial rhetoric. ‘It will never get as bad as Zimbabwe’ – I overhear whites saying this, when discussing the situation, their voices strident but also tinged by dread. Although the president himself has nothing against the whites – this is what Bill told me, during one those sparring matches we had which passed for conversations late at night in the Dhow House. He accepts that there can be such a creature as an African with white skin.
Even the last round of political violence failed to disperse them completely. A year and a half ago the advances of Al-Nur were repelled by the army, with assistance from the US and British military and intelligence services. This was kept quiet; it was considered an embarrassment to the government that the former colonists of the country were needed to quell the revolt. Ali and his men may have survived, melting across the border, or they may have been killed only a few hundred metres away, in Kilindoni harbour.
But before foreign forces were brought in, Al-Nur fighters walked into the Baridi shopping complex in Bahari ya Manda and sprayed bullets into the aisles, puncturing microwaves, jars of peanut butter, lungs and intestines. They shot at random from motorbikes into a crowd at the market, a place where Christians and Muslims have met to do business for two millennia, killing three Christian market stallholders and a German woman on holiday from Hamburg. The police mounted a sluggish, incoherent response, and Ali and his like sped away on the back of motorcycles, changing conveyance three times before arriving at a safe house in a suburb of the city.
I’ve been avoiding Reef Encounters. Now I slink in the entrance as if I expect to be recognised. But by whom? Margaux is long gone. Bill is dead. Julia is in South Africa. I wonder where Evan is? Evan might have stayed.
The place is unchanged with its serene, commanding view, the fishing boats that rise and fall on the breakers, their outriggers singing in the wind. The bar is full of people down from the highlands for Christmas. The nights are warmer now – 27 degrees. A table of young women sit outside, on the deck. I remember these people, their look, which I have never seen anywhere else. They look English but simultaneously not. Their hair is too glossy, their noses are small and upturned, like the noses of children, but their bodies are tanned and hard.
The last time I was here was the day I met Anthony. He had one last thing he needed to tell me. But not before he tried to allay my fears.
‘What you’re doing is very important to us,’ he said. ‘You’re a natural, as much as you might hate to hear it. You’re one of us.’
‘I’m not. Wrong background, wrong accent. I don’t come from a class bred for treachery.’
‘It’s not like that anymore.’
‘You said you have something to show me.’
He reached into the leather backpack he carried everywhere and drew out a peach-coloured folder. He swung open its front cover. Inside was a sheaf of pages. Between them, the edges of photographs peeked out.
‘Your uncle knows a businessman from Bahari ya Manda; in fact he’s from Dar es Salaam. He has an apartment in Shanghai.’
‘And?’
‘Your uncle is trading in illegal wildlife parts.’
‘I don’t think so. My uncle is a director of one of the biggest conservation agencies in Africa.’
‘But these days he can’t resist making a fortune from being above suspicion.’
I shook my head. ‘Since when do you care about wild animals?’
‘Since we discovered the profits are being funnelled to Al-Nur.’
‘He might be into land deals, greasing the palms of politicians. But financing terrorism? That’s impossible.’
‘He’s not aware of where the money is going. The horn and ivory he’s selling is being consolidated into shipments. It’s the shipment we’re concerned about.’
‘So he’s not…’ I searched for the word, ‘culpable?’
‘Well, that depends. Implicated in illegal wildlife trafficking: yes; arms dealing and aiding and abetting terrorism: no. The problem is,’ he said, raising his eyes to mine, his manner ever so slightly seen-it-all-before, ‘when you have so many business interests, you can never quite control where their tentacles will go.’
He extracted more pages from the folder. On these were email logs in small print, copies of statements from bank accounts in Guernsey, photos of Bill in Dar es Salaam with an Arab-looking man; photos of the same man meeting an Asian-looking man in Dubai. I swept my eyes over them quickly. CIA surveillance details, national security service files, letterhead bearing the logo of the US State Department.
‘How did you find out?’
‘Routine surveillance. Guernsey authorities have recently signed an agreement with us.’ He stared into the distance for a minute, his face impassive. ‘We were watching his contact in Dar. So it was an accident, a confluence of two circumstances, you could say. Not that this is a priority. We’re too busy right now with straight terrorism.’
I looked at the images again. All the details were pristine, so sharp they seemed to leap out of the photo. A breakfast buffet behind the men, papaya, pineapple, their spiny tops, the slumped postures of bona fide tourists, a woman with an expensive-looking watch wearing a crisp shirt, thin and devouring. Delphine.
‘That’s his sister.’
‘Yes, she’s currently supplementing her income with wildlife trophies from Zambia and Mozambique. Bill gave her a very useful contact in the man from Dar it seems.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I don’t think we’ll move on it.’ He scowled. ‘Arguably the financing of terrorist groups from illegal wildlife parts is the growing criminal activity in this part of Africa. But we don’t have the capacity to tackle it, never mind the jurisdiction. We might pass it to the national authorities but it depends who they are. Everything’s on hold until the election. I don’t need to stress that this is confidential.’
‘Who am I going to tell? My uncle?’
He gave me a level look. He might have thought I had been converted, that I considered myself one of them now.
‘Why are you telling me?’ I pressed.
‘Because we owe you. We thought you should know.’
‘I don’t think you operate like that. Dues to pay, good turns to honour.’ I shook my head. ‘I’ve been no use to you here.’
‘It was never a priority, really. On the other hand, what you did in Gariseb –’ his face became formal, composed – ‘that was very helpful.’
Anthony appraised me then as they all did. I had been wrong to think they took me seriously, or that I could escape my involvement with them, what I had done. I was a chess piece, a plinth of black lacquer. If he could manoeuvre me onto the right square, he could take the king. If not now, then eventually, when the moment was right.
On the walk back through the village I pass a gate I recognise. Kaskazi, the blue-and-white ceramic nameplate on the coral wall announces. In the background is a faded drawing of a dhow on the ocean. The house belongs to the man who makes the country’s ice cream. We came to a party here, the four of us – Storm, Lucy, Evan and I. On a patio by the pool people writhed and puckered like the speared octopus I saw boys on the beach carrying in buckets.
In the house there is a bathroom, an en suite off a bedroom containing an enormous teak bed. The floor underneath our feet trembles with the bass from the speakers.
His skin was always cool and pale, even in the heat. I licked it, the hollow between his two plate-like shoulder blades, to cool my mouth. We rarely spoke. He was so
much taller than me. I lost myself in his limbs. It felt not like sleeping with a man but with another species. I always wanted the light off. I was afraid he would see me in some angle or motion or moment of crisis and think, She looks old. I feared he would see something else, too.
He lifted me easily onto the counter next to the bathroom sink. The taps were in the shape of dolphins; their noses butted into the small of my back. We stayed like that for a while, long enough for our absence to be noticed, my legs wrapped around his torso. I can see them, my feet entwined below his buttocks, in the mirror. Not my feet but those of a much browner, thinner woman, toenails painted the blue of cuckoo’s eggs.
It is strange, how we could hardly speak to each other, yet we could do this. How kissing was not an exchange of tongues and saliva at all, but rummaging in each other’s souls. He brought me closer to myself than I could. Or he took me to a nameless place, which I had just vacated, and now it was inhabited only by the wind.
We registered the shock on each other’s faces. I thought she would turn and walk away. When she didn’t, I said, ‘Lucy.’
We stood, arms limp by our sides. The high-altitude sun stung me. We were prodded into action because we stood in a car park. Black cars with red diplomatic plates brushed past us as they slid into parking bays. I felt their heat as they passed.
I knew it was possible that I would cross paths with any of them. But for some reason I never thought it would actually happen. I had no plan for how I would react, what I would say.
I watched her hesitate. She mustered her resolve and walked towards me with that light-footed stride of hers.
‘I thought you went back to England.’
‘I did. I’ve come back for a month to sit an exam.’
‘What exam?’
‘I tried to do my bird guiding exam in England, but it had to be written either in South Africa or here.’
The next thing I said was a kind of apology. ‘I never thought I’d return.’