by Jean McNeil
Julia was shaking. Little tremors skittering like sidewinding snakes, all over her body. Our faces were white masques of shock.
Get out. Storm’s voice.
I thought I didn’t hear correctly. My face must have looked like the moon. Some stupid grey orb.
I had thought he had punched me in the stomach but later I remembered Julia pulling at his arms. He must have put his hands around my neck and I’d fallen to the floor under his weight.
Get your hands off her! Julia was clawing at her son, pummelling his chest. She tried to protect me.
In the corner of the infinity pool, a pied kingfisher bathed. He shook out his piebald feathers, now stiff and wet.
This was the last thing I saw of the house – the bird in the corner of the pool, a butterscotch wall behind him, and three living statues in the kitchen.
Then I was running. The Estate, the dust-fringed tired bougainvillea leaves. The morning sun gripped the leafless limbs of the baobab. A pickup truck full of men with rusted automatic weapons rumbled by. The crazy woman running in the middle of a war, look at her go. Running through an inner city, a sea of broken bodies, her future only gravity’s shadow, poised on the edge of darkness.
For five days and nights we waited to be invaded, to be blown up by grenades tossed over the walls from all directions. But the terrified army recruits kept the Kilindoni Club safe, or the insurgents had bigger problems at Bahari ya Manda, where they hit five hotels in quick succession, although these had been deserted by foreigners. They managed to kill the cooks, waiters, chambermaids and reservation staff who had huddled in the generator shed for safety.
At some point in those days a transformation took place. A devouring energy sunk into Rebecca like dye. Part of her cleaved away. The rupture was soundless but she felt it happening. She was becoming me. I was born in this hotel room in the Kilindoni Club two and a half years ago: an iteration, another, more resilient, self. This happens in many people’s lives, sometimes more than once – our core selves remain, perhaps, but it is not a rebirth or a resurrection. I don’t know if to describe it as sloughing a skin, or a death. All I know is that the Rebecca who existed until then retreated, shocked to find herself a newly minted ghost.
I still see her, those nights when she sat with a hurricane lamp in her room, no air conditioning or fan, the door open to the night. She thought, Something has been let loose inside me. A reverse self. Needy, uncontrollable. Feral. But why the state of emergency? She didn’t even feel that the day Ali and his men came for her. Why the panic? The answer came back smoothly from some other self. Because someone who two months ago you hardly knew existed had suddenly become necessary to your survival. The panic comes from your realisation that you may not be able to live without him, or that you may not want to.
There were two kinds of love, Rebecca knew: conscious and unconscious. Conscious love you professed every day, reminding yourself why you loved the person, thinking fond thoughts, remembering their deeds of kindness and the security of their presence. Unconscious love was like being shot through into a different dimension. Here the world was fascinatingly altered. Here you lived in a vertigo of elation and fear and need. Once you had lived in this country it was very difficult to return to the other, safer, more reasonable, place.
I see her arriving in their house that June day, stunned and enervated by the heat and by a sudden panic that she was not about to be called upon to act at any moment, that no one – certainly not Rafael – would burst through the door of the house and shout for her to clamp an artery, to deliberate between a typhoid and malaria diagnosis, to sever a mine-ruined foot.
I see her meeting Storm for the first time, that her reaction was genuine. She really did think, Oh, my younger cousin. Good to meet you. But in the same moment she perceived the transfixing hollowness at his core and this did not frighten her as it would have done in another human being, rather she understood he might be the key to a similar space within her, that he was an alternate self. His blunt stare, the sick thrill in her stomach, the defibrillator jolt of her heart: it was all a decoy for this more abstract truth.
I see her fear. She suspected that this blameless young man might lead her to purloin her dignity. Perhaps from the first moment she arrived she was accompanied by that dank chaperone, the shadow self. This creature had its own agenda. It was tired – so tired – of storing facts, of having an opinion, of knowing everything. This accompanier sank into the Dhow House as if into a leather sofa, admiring the expense of its texture. It knew Rebecca had registered its presence and that she was spooked. She had been to Afghanistan, Kurdistan, and now Gariseb, looking for ways to rid herself of her internal stalker. She had tried to extinguish it by smothering it with rational thought, with knowledge and aptitude.
I tried to talk to this buried self, to reason: You are a natural double agent, a natural spy, I told it. I know that once you have savoured the tarnish of betrayal, you develop a taste for it, a devious addiction. I won’t let you ruin me.
The other Rebecca recoiled from the word, but this other self found betrayal so much easier than I did. A very long time ago, one part of her – the ambitious, belligerent, intellectually aggressive part – easily dominated the caring, sensitive person. The loss of her mother fuelled this fission. It took what she did in Gariseb to reveal how thoroughly the other Rebecca had been crushed. And then Storm. After the first betrayal, the next is easier. I wonder if that was apparent to them – to Anthony and his brethren – those professional manipulators to whom I was useful for a time. I wonder if they spotted the crack inside me, long before I did.
But it isn’t betrayal itself which generates the allure, rather the discovery of the exact grain of your soul, like fine wood, pitched against itself, doubling back and back until it is more like stone, or keratin, the horn and ivory of animal lust and animal life. Betrayal is a sophisticated savagery. It brings you in contact with the self that is also wild. A predator.
Perhaps this was the self who allowed Storm to command her to crawl around the empty living room, blindfolded. Crawl, he said, and she did as she was told, if slowly, trying to fend off the legs of armchairs, the edges of tables. This was the self who would allow him to fall on her, drag down her underpants, take her from behind on the floor, in the darkness, where she would have to brace herself against the baraza. This version of Rebecca lay back and from behind her blindfold, on the dark screen of her eyelids, and watched flint stars careen across her mind.
I know she is here, in this room in a four-star tropical hotel. Each time I perceive her she is aware of me. I see her in the mirror after I have returned from swimming in the pool with its view over the Indian Ocean. She is thinner than I am, made beautiful by her desire. Please stay, I say. She glides towards me, gives me an admonitory look, then turns and melts into the shadows.
New Years’ Eve. The coast is packed for the holidays. Its beaches and resorts have returned to favour, now that the coast is calm.
In the Kilindoni Club they are taking the Christmas tree down. It is plastic, silver garlands lumped on its branches, frosted baubles. Underneath it are empty boxes wrapped in foil paper, once blue and silver, faded to grey by the sun. Families sit around the flat-screen television which beams British sport and watch rectangles of green pitch, men running across it, hurling themselves at each other, a distant roar, people bundled in duffel coats and hats.
I go to Reef Encounters for the yearly New Year’s Eve party. Four hundred people will come. I won’t stay until midnight. I just want to lose myself in the crowd.
In the car park the 4x4s are parked three rows deep. Christmas and New Year is the best time to observe this lost tribe of white people. The women with their narrow bronzed shoulders, the kikois and khangas they wear tied halter-like around their necks. Their beaded jewelry and butterscotch faces, the faces of babies, until one point in their early thirties when suddenly they harden.
Now, at Reef Encounters, where I write staring out to sea,
they are around me, talking in small groups around circular tables. It is nine o’clock; in an hour and a half the disco will begin. The waiters wear the same mint-and-orange uniforms.
The crowd grows. I am at the bar ordering a beer – baridi sana, I say, because they have a habit here of giving you a beer from the front of the fridge where the heat presses against its door, when something makes me swivel my head over my right shoulder.
Driftwood hair. Blue eyes. A tall man. The smile that is an explosion. He is standing at the far end of the bar, talking to three or four men his age. I scan the group. I can’t see Evan. I can’t see any women.
He is raising a bottle of Duma beer to his lips but he stops before drinking and laughs at something one of the other men has said. He throws his head back so that I can see the sinews of his neck. He wears a black shirt that makes his eyes shine like coins.
I turn back to the barman. I try to hide my body behind that of the man next to me. The crowd presses in from all directions.
3am. The night I come into the living room and heard the snake, wrapped around the lamp. Two hours later a peach silk light soaks the sky. We listen to the crack of the sea at high tide, each wave an explosion. The sea fills and drains like a glass until where the coral pools have been invisible, ripples begin to appear. In minutes the tide has pulled back and the smooth ridges of coral, the actual architecture of the shoreline, appears. The snorkelling boat with its name – DESIRE – emblazoned across the side, glides into the horizon. The house broadcasts no internal sounds, no snoring or creaking floorboards, no indication that people live there at all, only the sounds of the sea, a silent oceanic cathedral.
‘You two, you’re always up at the crack of dawn.’
Julia was lovely in the first minutes of waking, before she tidied her hair and applied mascara. She looked like the girl he could have been. All the features and quirks I found so compelling in Julia’s face Storm had inherited: her broad, cruel mouth, an intelligent forehead, fine eyes which always harboured a note of hope, the strong nose, the cheekbones unfurled on either side of her face. She had made Storm, and that was an accomplishment. Julia’s strange prophecy was correct: I will probably never have children. I will never know the propriety mothers can feel over the bodies of their sons.
What do you want from me? Julia screamed at me on that terrible morning in the house. Do you want my life?
Perhaps I did. Perhaps I wanted the barbecues and the fishing trips and the dinner parties for businessmen visiting from Mozambique, from Zimbabwe, men like her husband, who had enriched themselves in countries of great poverty. The cordon bleu cooking courses and watercolour and interior design and pottery courses, the sudden interest in making mosaics or applique collages which you would sell through pulling a few strings in London or Paris.
Storm didn’t want any of this. He was ready to take flight from the luxurious torpor of his family. All this had failed to make him happy. I was on the outside trying to get in, and he was trying to escape. On the threshold we found each other.
How can you do this to me, to us? At the time I thought, us, meaning her family. But now it occurs to me Julia might have meant my mother.
I walk across the bar of Reef Encounters in full view. I know he won’t see me, somehow. I lean over the railing above the ocean and drink my beer. I stare at the cheetah’s uncertain face on the label. I’ve looked at this beer bottle a thousand times, but only now do I see the downward cast of the two black tear marks underneath the cat’s eyes. The cheetah is a predator, but a furtive, delicate one. It hunts in the day to avoid confronting the leopard or lion, which often kill it. The cheetah’s only defense is its speed.
Three men stand next to me. They cast me glances from time to time. The friendly, non-committal Tom emerged from just such a trio in this exact place, two and a half years ago. The symmetry of the moment hits me, a reversed déjà vu.
I turn around. He is leaning against the bar, his hip curled into its rim, in the exact place I inhabited ten minutes before. That is all that separates our bodies: ten metres, the ten seconds it would take to walk across the floor.
My bird exam is behind me, my recitations of species lists, of Latin names, of passerines and non-passerines, breeding habits, reproductive strategies, distribution and habitat. I did well; I passed. I always pass.
From my perch on the terrace I see a bee-eater on a fly-by. They fly acrobatically, winging up through the air, near-vertical, then yawing sideways so fast, as if they’ve just activated an engine. Little, northern carmine, Somali, white-fronted, white-throated, blue-cheeked, European, Böhm’s. Family Meropidae. Bee-eaters are an endearing family of birds with their lollipop colours, the black stripe across their eyes that gives them the air of a masked bandit. You cannot tell the male and female apart. Bee-eaters are sally hunters; they consume their prey in flight. Their throats are lined with tough skin, resistant to stingers. What for other birds would be poison for them is sweet.
Bee-eaters have a unique trick: when bathing in water and so exposed they lie with outspread wings and their heads twisted to the side, as if broken, one eye closed, to fool potential predators. They look dead, but are alive.
The car turns at the junction to the beachside airstrip. It is 3 January. I arrive on time for the daily flight to the capital at 3.15pm to find the plane is delayed by three hours. ‘Protocol!’ says the airport staff, thrilled to use these words. ‘Very important people.’
I go outside the airport terminal to wait. Women hawkers sit in the shade, baskets of mangoes at their feet to sell to passengers departing for the capital.
The VIPs turn out to count among their number Charles Mgura, Julia and Bill’s neighbour, and Eugene, the politico I met in the Dhow House. As I board they are strapping themselves into business-class seats. I stare directly at Eugene but his eyes do not even flicker.
The plane pirouettes and glides to the end of the runway. The sun has reached the treetops. We will arrive in a darkening capital with its night-time thunderstorms. My connecting flight to London leaves at midnight. From my seat I watch piebald African sacred ibis peck at the ground. A heron takes flight, wings kneading the air with commanding lassitude. He flies against the red sunset.
The plane charges towards the highway. It is a short-run airstrip and the small jet needs to accelerate quickly to clear the fence at the end of the airfield.
We are aloft and climbing over the coast. I keep my face pressed to the cold of the window. Beneath me I see the scatter of lights of Moholo and Kilindoni. The long stretch of silver beach darkens in the brief twilight.
Tonight people are drinking Duma beer at the Baharini bar, at Reef Encounters, at the Sahara restaurant. Kitesurfers are reposing on the beach, stroking their thin, alert dogs. Women move through white houses, flicking lights that may or may not turn on, thinking of the hour, soon now, when they will serve their husbands a drink. Women in the backland villages light the makaa, prepare chicken for the grill; their children will study by candle and kerosene lamps.
The sea sounds louder at night. Mosque swallows pour from minarets, unfurling in curlicues above the ruins of Swahili cities now inhabited by monkeys and narrow-mouthed mambas, by madafu hawkers with bloodshot eyes.
Storm is there. What will he do tonight? He has many friends. They will gather in teal pools of darkness, drinking beer by hurricane lamp, listening to trumpeter hornbills swaying in the anaemic upper branches of casuarinas. Evening glosses the ocean. Pied kingfishers fly out of the creek, heading to their roosts for the night.
Note: The majority of place names in this novel do not exist. The names for ethnicities and political factions are also fictitious. However, the bird, animal and tree species named are generally those found in coastal or upland East Africa.
Short glossary of Swahili terms
Askari – guard, watchman
Bahari/baharini – the sea, to the sea
Baraza – sofa
Baridi – cold
Bui-bui – a chardor, often black and decorated with colourful detailing, worn by Muslim women on the Indian Ocean coast
Bwana – sir, a term of respect
Dudu – insect
Duka – shop
Filusi – blue-and-yellow ocean-going fish also called dorado or mahi mahi; the common dolphinfish
Hakuna – not any, none
Jahazi – type of dhow; can also refer to the mainsail
Kanzu – the embroidered cotton full-length robe worn by Muslim men on the Indian Ocean coast
Khanga – a printed fabric worn by women
Kikoi – a cotton sarong-like wrap, traditionally worn by men to go to mosque in the morning
Kofia – an embroidered cap worn by Muslim men
Mabati – galvanised iron sheets used largely for roofing
Madafu – coconuts/coconut water
Mafuta ya taa – paraffin
Mahindi – roasted corn on the cob
Makaa – charcoal
Makuti – thatch made from the sun-dried leaves of the coconut palm
Mama – lady, madam
Matatu – minibus taxi
Mshumaa – a candle
Pole – sorry
Pwani – the coast
Rafiki – friend
Sana – very, or well
Shamba – farm; a plot for growing vegetables
Wageni - guests
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My sincere thanks for their help in the writing and publication of this novel go to Veronique Baxter at David Higham Associates for her continued support for my work, Susan Renouf at ECW publishers in Toronto for her diligent and insightful edit, Lauren Parsons at Legend for believing in the novel and for her helpful editorial input, and to Henry Sutton at the University of East Anglia, whose collegial support and reading of an earlier draft of this novel have been invaluable. I am very fortunate to work at UEA, where I am surrounded by talented writers, students and lecturers alike. Terry Stevenson and John Fanshawe’s Birds of East Africa is the definitive field guide to the bird life of the region and it has been an essential resource in the writing of sections of this book.