The Dhow House

by Jean McNeil

  We looked at each other. We could not see each other’s eyes behind our sunglasses. Her hair was lighter. She wore the same pair of dark blue skinny jeans as she did on cooler days in the Dhow House. No rings gripped her fingers. Her nails were unpainted. She wore none of the feathered necklaces and silver bangles of before.

  She was talking easily, she was telling me something innocuous – how she had eucalyptus trees in her garden but was trying to have them cut down because the colobus monkeys didn’t like them – when I remembered everything. The last time I saw Lucy. Her eyes were red. The smell of rage in the room. The scene – all of us frozen in horror.

  I said, ‘Well, I should be going.’

  I perceived her relief that I was not going to ask after her mother or her brother. Her mouth began to speak, then hesitated. She was swallowing some automatic pleasantry that had nearly escaped.

  I felt a crushing weight on me. A bomb, another fucking bomb, and we were caught in it.

  When I opened my eyes, Lucy was still there. Her face loomed in my vision. She had taken off her sunglasses. Behind her the sun blared.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You fainted.’

  She drove me home that day. She insisted. She negotiated the hellish roundabouts of the city, where juggernaut trucks not only never braked if you got in their way but bore down on you with relish. She was suddenly voluble. My loss of consciousness had enlivened her.

  ‘I’ve been practicing for a year. I came back after I qualified in England. My clients are all expats – UN types, mostly. I don’t have many friends here,’ she said. ‘It’s an occupational hazard of coming from such a close family.’

  Her hair had grown very long. She kept tugging it back, when it flew out the window as she drove, veering between lanes, flinging the car at stop lights.

  ‘I appreciate your doing this.’

  ‘You fainted in a supermarket parking lot. I’m hardly going to leave you there.’ She paused to let a lorry lumber through the roundabout. ‘I know you’re a doctor, but don’t you think you should be looked at?’

  ‘I’ve never fainted before. Well, maybe once.’

  ‘I know it must be a shock, seeing me.’

  ‘It was. It is.’ I looked out the window. We were passing the hotels that lined the airport road. This was also the highway that bisected the country, lined with ragged palm trees and their cargo of marabou storks, who sat in their branches like hunch-shouldered undertakers.

  I looked at Lucy then, really looked at her. She was no different. Apart from her longer, lighter hair, nothing had changed.

  We met once a week over the following weeks, usually at the Coffeestop in the Baridi shopping centre. She told me about finishing her postdoctoral training in England. She had worked at the Maudsley for six months, then taken the decision to come home. She didn’t mention Evan. On those first meetings our conversation was light and friendly, as if we had only just met each other.

  We sat among the bonsai palms underneath the café’s awning. ‘Julia’s coming up for the weekend,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to tell her you’re here.’

  ‘I wouldn’t expect you to.’ The mention of her name caught me off guard. If Lucy exists, then Julia exists, then Storm exists too.

  ‘When did you start calling your mother by her first name?’

  ‘A year or so ago.’ Lucy said. ‘I decided I had to make a break. It was part of my analysis. Our boundaries weren’t clear. That can happen in families. Even if she was always closer to Storm.’

  Our coffee sessions moved to evening drinks, although I was trying not to drink. I told her I’d developed a problem in England. On winter nights I would sit at my desk and read or write emails, and I began to need a glass of wine. Then another. Soon I was drinking three-quarters of a bottle of wine a night. To end each day drunk suddenly became necessary.

  ‘That happens. But usually only if there is something you want to blot out of your consciousness.’

  She gave me a look that was unmistakable. Judicious, not particularly kind. But why would I expect kindness? It was already a miracle we were speaking.

  Once or twice on a Friday we went to one of the cocktail bars of the moment, located on the tenth floor of one of the new ovoid glass buildings that had sprouted in the suburbs. The bar became a club after seven in the evening, when diplomats and foreign correspondents and businessmen from Uganda or Burundi or Senegal would accumulate. The security was watertight – three private guys, armed to the teeth. ‘Ex-Secret Service,’ Lucy whispered as we brushed past their black-suited bulk. ‘I know the guy who owns the company. He’s a Sikh, calls himself Killer Singh. He’s rumoured to have a knife in his turban.’

  All the talk in the city now was about threat and defense. Everyone seemed to be carrying a weapon. In the suburbs, near the embassy, householders slept with a shotgun under their beds. People involved in minor fender benders were frequently shot by an enraged driver; everyone had taken to fleeing the scene of accidents. People met only in areas that were well secured, now. The memory of Al-Nur’s attack on the Usimama in Lubaga Heights a year and a half before was still fresh. Locals and expats alike now preferred to stay in their guarded compounds patrolled by Rottweilers, hosting lavish dinner parties for a decreasing circle of intimates as people abandoned the country for England, America, even Israel. ‘When people think Israel’s safer you know it’s bad,’ Lucy said.

  The hotel and cocktail bars were where people desperate for the random appeal of the stranger congregated. They made a heady multinational mash of people, almost none of whom were who or what they said they were: ordinary spooks, corporate spies, regional heads of the UN food and agriculture programme, disgraced missionaries, doctors working in the sticks on aid contracts – we even met a couple of aid apparatchiks from Lichtenstein. Later we leaned into each other’s ears and whispered, Do they really expect us to believe them? Lichtenstein?

  She understood I was not going to rake over the past, or not straight away. Gradually we became more confiding of each other. ‘Do you have a…’ None of the words I could choose – partner, boyfriend – seemed right. Directed at Lucy, who was so demure, so private, they sounded garish. I settled for relationship.

  ‘I’m not that interested in relationships right now.’

  ‘But you’re an intimate person,’ I said.

  She smiled then, a smile so much like her brother’s, but more wounded, and so warmer. ‘I need to leave the country for a while,’ she said. ‘I’m going to South Africa, to do a course in working in post-conflict situations. PTSD, that sort of thing.’

  The crowd pressed itself around us. We watched a tall woman in a white dress and four-inch heels seat herself on a bar stool next to a Sudanese man.

  ‘There’s one thing I want to ask you.’

  I turned back to look at Lucy. And waited. Why did you sleep with my brother? Did you have a hand in my father’s death? How long did you know about him and Evan? What does matter to you? Why did you try to destroy our family?

  ‘Why didn’t you defend yourself?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When Storm hit you.’

  ‘I was in shock.’

  Lucy looked away. ‘I’ve thought about it a lot over the last two years. After Dad died we were hysterical. We took it out on you. But I didn’t expect him to do that.’

  ‘He was angry with me.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Everything. For falling asleep that night in his bed.’

  ‘I had the impression you were about to say something. That’s why he hit you.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘You’d have to ask him.’

  The music changed. The bar’s DJ was nearby. He was dressed in skinny jeans and a T-shirt that said Hoxton Brewing Company. On his back he carried a strange contraption, like an archer’s bag. Out of it protruded arrows. I stared at his archery kit, as if it offered some explanation.

  ‘Storm has always been someone who is capa
ble of turning people inside out,’ Lucy said. ‘He doesn’t set out to do it.’

  I had an image then of a sweater being pulled, arms flailing, seams exposed.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s a lightning rod. He turns people against their better natures. He knows he has an effect but he can’t name it.’

  ‘But you can.’

  Lucy raised her glass in a mock salute. ‘That’s what I’m trained to do. Although with family I’m not sure it’s possible to have the necessary distance. It’s like trying to analyse yourself.’

  The music seemed to animate the men in the bar. We were interrupted as two of them approached us. I watched their eyes flick over our faces, then settle on Lucy. She dispatched them efficiently and they moved on to easier game.

  ‘Later I understood you didn’t have had anything to do with – with the attack.’ Her eyes slipped away. Later I would realise that not once during our meetings did she say, my father’s death, or, my father is dead. She might not believe it, even now. ‘After you’d gone, I wanted to –’ she was speaking quickly now – ‘to get in touch with you, somehow. Email, Facebook, whatever. But I found I couldn’t. I don’t know why.’

  ‘There weren’t any communications on the coast for a week,’ I said, even though I knew this was not the reason she didn’t contact me.

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘I missed my flight. Then they cancelled all flights for a week, until after the elections. I stayed at the Kilindoni Club.’

  I had a flash of those weeks, living on my credit card, the Zimbabwean managers taking pity on me with my one change of shorts and a T-shirt and selling me an ill-fitting linen shirt from their souvenir shop at a discount.

  ‘That must have been difficult.’

  ‘If we’d come under attack it wouldn’t have been good,’ I admitted.

  ‘Julia might ask me if I’ve been in touch with you,’ Lucy said. ‘What do you think I should say?’

  ‘I think you should say no. You should pretend not to have thought of me once, in these two and a half years.’

  She frowned at my voice, which sounded odd, even to me: aggrieved and contrite at once, relieved too, perhaps. I had just realised I hadn’t ruined their family after all. I was just a temporary interloper. They were stronger than any one rogue element, which they would simply absorb, as the sea swallows waves.

  ‘I should never have armed us. I should have tried to talk them down. I’ve spent too long in, in…’ I fell back on a default term, ‘in conflict situations.’

  ‘It was a stray bullet,’ Lucy said. ‘This is a dangerous country. Everyone’s armed.’

  ‘What does Julia blame me for, then?’

  ‘Storm.’

  His name sat between us. I could have asked then, where is he? Who does he love now? Who is he turning inside out?

  ‘She saw it as a betrayal,’ Lucy said.

  ‘It was.’

  We were silent for a minute.

  ‘You never said what you thought,’ Lucy said. ‘About how we lived, what was happening in the country. You never said much at all.’

  ‘I’m a reserved person.’

  ‘I could see that,’ she said.

  ‘But also, I didn’t dare open my mouth.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was afraid of your mother.’

  ‘Afraid of Julia?’ Lucy scowled – not with disbelief, if I was not mistaken, but with recognition. She might also fear her mother.

  I told Lucy that while I lived in Julia’s – in their – house I refrained from making judgements because Julia was the closest thing alive to my mother, or who my mother had been, that to anger or disappoint her would have been to live through my relationship with my mother again. That is why my manners became smooth and gracious and I came to feel detached. That is why I quickly stopped making private judgements about their fundraising dinners and corporate golfing outings.

  ‘Julia liked you, you know,’ she said.

  ‘Did she?’

  Now that I think of it, I hardly saw Julia outside of the house. She preferred to do her shopping alone. We never went to Kilindoni village or walked through the streets of Moholo together. My life outside the house was lived alone, or with Margaux, or Storm. Perhaps Julia avoided taking me anywhere because she understood I would see a completely different reality to the one she saw.

  I did not tell Lucy what I really thought: that Julia had no sense of me as an independent being; she saw me only as a riposte to her children, a rebuke, even. She papered over this unease by taking me under her wing. It was important to her that I be an innocent – an imbecile, preferably – because I had not grown up in Africa. I was unaware of its intricate power structure, its racisms, its ethnic groups and allegiances. I came from the theme park of England, with its monarchs and mortgage insurance policies and self-checkout machines.

  ‘It’s my birthday next month.’ Lucy’s mouth was set in an unhappy shape. ‘I keep saying to myself, you’re thirty-one and alone. I ought to take charge of my life. I ought to be a person of substance.’

  ‘You are. You’re a qualified psychiatrist. You’re helping people.’

  ‘I’m just having to get used to the fact I won’t be young anymore.’

  ‘Thirty-one is young, believe me.’

  I had a vision of what she would look like, when she was older, her mouth puckered, her face weathered by the tropical sun. She would still be lovely, but a hardness would set her features. She had Storm’s statuesque quality in her face, but in hers it was latent, waiting to emerge.

  ‘In past generations people had three children by the time they were thirty,’ she said. ‘They were adults. I think you only truly become an adult when you have children, when you are responsible for other people’s existences.’

  ‘There are many ways to be responsible for other people’s existences.’

  As I said this, I wondered, why did we not talk to each other more, in that month we shared a house, a family? We have something in common, Lucy and I: our intellect, our ambition, our interest in ideas as entities that free us from the impersonality of life. Life without ideas is just a ceaseless lurch from event to event, stimulus to stimulus.

  She watched me. She might have understood the disenchantment that had passed through me.

  ‘When I first came to stay with your mother I was recovering from an attack.’

  I sat back, afraid but thrilled at my admission. I’d had two beers and two daiquiris by that point. I wasn’t sure of my motivation, of where I was going.

  ‘What kind of attack?’

  ‘When I was working at Gariseb.’

  She inclined her head. There was a professional slant in the gesture. ‘Why were you attacked?’

  ‘Because insurgents I had treated thought I was responsible for the destruction of the town where they were based.’

  ‘Were you?’

  I looked away from her gaze. It was the same look she had given me so many times in the Dhow House. A look delicately poised between the neutrality of curiosity and the scald of suspicion.

  ‘They were angry. They wanted revenge.’

  Lucy had cooled. I had ignited her suspicion again. But my desire for admonition was too strong – that was what I wanted: not her forgiveness, but her condemnation.

  ‘I knew there was something else. I mean, besides Storm. That’s why I tried to talk to you on the beach. You were displaying classic symptoms of PTSD. But you knew that. I thought it would end badly somehow, for you. Although I didn’t think you would be sleeping with my brother.’ She huffed, a sound between a grunt and a snort. ‘I thought you should talk to someone.’

  ‘And if I had spoken to someone, what would they have concluded?’

  ‘That you were angry, although subconsciously. That’s why you did what you did with Storm. You wanted to get back at the family, because you hadn’t had our lives. And also…’ For the first time since we had met in the supermarket parking lot, Lu
cy’s face tensed. ‘You wanted to fall in love, to seduce.’ She looked away. ‘That’s also a way of belonging to something other than yourself, seemingly. It’s a narcissistic impulse.’

  ‘Is that why you don’t want a relationship? It’s a narcissistic impulse?’

  ‘I’ve thought myself out of relationships. I’m not unhappy about it.’

  ‘But you’re not happy either.’

  ‘I’m neutral, and in a neutral place I am less likely to do damage.’

  ‘Lucy,’ I said. ‘It was a mutual seduction.’

  Her eyes had hardened. Their darkness had a streak of deep blue in them, like tanzanite. Why hadn’t I seen it before?

  ‘The older person is always more responsible for it, though, don’t you think?’ It was a question but there was a steely, independent note in her voice. ‘You were going to say something. That’s why he hit you. He was afraid. What was it you were about to say?’

  ‘That he was Evan’s lover. It was Evan he loved, or loves. Not me.’

  She crossed her legs at the knees, her bare ankles pale and demure.

  ‘Did you know that?’

  She didn’t answer. ‘When Evan was adopted it was uncommon for a white family to have a black child. Now you see it all the time.’

  ‘Do you mean he wanted to be white?’

  ‘I mean he was white on the inside but black on the outside. Storm is black on the inside but white on the outside. They’re a perfect fit.’ There were tears in her eyes. It was the first time I’d seen her cry, since that morning.

  I understood it was time to bring our meeting to a close.

  ‘I’m going to the coast for a couple of weeks, over Christmas. I won’t go near the house. I wanted you to know.’

  ‘I know you won’t,’ she said. I watched her gather her things: a beaded dark brown leather bag made on the coast, her car keys. As she reached for them her hand hovered.

  ‘We found your gun.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘In the bag you left behind. I didn’t know doctors carried guns.’

  ‘They do, sometimes. Gariseb was a dangerous place.’

  ‘Why didn’t you use it the night Dad was shot?’