‘You’re too arrogant,’ Azalea would accuse him. ‘You can’t simply dismiss my views just because they make no sense to you.’
And he was arrogant. Of course he was arrogant. But even when he tried to conceal his arrogance with counterfeit understanding, she would see through the gambit and this would upset her even more. ‘I don’t need you to pretend,’ she would say.
‘Then what do you need?’
What indeed?
She had sought him out to explain her coincidences, but she couldn’t accept his explanation.
‘Everything happens for a reason.’
‘Then why,’ he would ask, ‘do bad things happen? Why do people die young? Why did Marion die? Why did Luke and Rebecca die? Why did my mother die?’
‘I never said . . . that the reason was a good reason.’
‘So some things happen for an evil reason?’
And she would look at him with sorrow in her large eyes. ‘Sometimes. Yes.’
Then this would awaken the arrogance. ‘Post hoc ergo propter hoc,’ he quoted to her. ‘Are you familiar with this aphorism? It means “After this – therefore because of this”. It’s an expression we use to describe lazy logic. Because A happened before B, therefore A caused B. Because I stepped on the lines between the kerbstones, that’s why I failed my maths test. Because the rooster crows, that’s why the sun rises. It’s faulty reasoning. You see something happen, and then later something else happens, and you conclude that the second event was the reason for the first event.’
‘So you think I’m stupid?’ Azalea would say.
But Thomas had yet to learn that questions beginning with ‘so’ were a trap.
And if all of this was one explanation for the orbital drift between the lovers, there was another reason; far more prosaic, but even harder, somehow, for Thomas to accept.
She would never admit to it. Not aloud. Not in an intimate moment. When Thomas would whisper, ‘Why don’t you do relationships, Miss Lewis?’ she would murmur, ‘I don’t know. Why don’t you do poetry?’ Only in open conversation could she try to hide the truth. Only when she knew that Thomas wasn’t really, truly listening could she conceal her reasons in plain sight. One evening they snatched a drink in a pub on the Tottenham Court Road, when she had just a few short minutes before a lecture and his day was all but over. They stood in a corner with a glass each, and the noise of a jukebox made conversation difficult.
‘You do understand why I can’t do relationships, don’t you, Thomas?’ Azalea said, and she said it with such a smile of affection that he could only return it.
‘Explain it to me.’
‘I’m not really a Lewis. I’m a Folley.’
‘Should I call you Miss Folley?’
‘If you like. But I’m not speaking legally. I’m speaking metaphorically.’
‘So Folley is a metaphor, then?’
‘No, not really.’ Her smile turned a little more sorrowful and Thomas pulled her close and kissed her.
‘You do understand, don’t you, Thomas? You understand the burden? The Folley burden?’
Thomas probably didn’t, but of course he nodded. She wanted him to understand.
‘Good. Because a time will come when I have to go. It will come soon.’
He looked at his watch. ‘You have at least five minutes.’
She kissed him on his nose. ‘Bless you,’ she said. ‘I knew you’d understand.’ But she knew he didn’t.
Another time, they were in her flat in Highgate. She was marking a pile of essays. Thomas was idly watching football on TV. They were batting comments back and forth across her living room.
‘Where would you go,’ she asked him, ‘if you could go anywhere?’
‘Florida,’ he said too quickly.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know, really. Lots to do. Beaches. Things like that. Or Hawaii, perhaps. Great for a holiday.’
Azalea was silent for a while. ‘What if you had to live somewhere else? Where would you go?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Italy probably. Tuscany is lovely. Or maybe up by Lake Garda. There’s a restaurant on the harbour front at Malcesine with a view over the lake to Limone. We could eat there every night.’
Another long silence. On the TV someone missed a goal.
‘Maybe we could,’ she said.
‘And what about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘Where would you live?’
‘You know where I’d live.’
‘No I don’t.’
He turned away from the TV screen to look at her, and again she disarmed him with a smile.
‘I’d live in Uganda. West Nile.’
‘But you’ve already lived there. Bad things happened to you there.’
‘I know.’ Azalea shrugged. ‘But I’m a Folley, remember?’
‘You’re a Lewis now.’
‘My passport says I’m a Lewis.’ But her heart, she might have added, still called her a Folley. And the calling had to come to the Folley young. Sooner or later, it would come.
But that was in the early autumn, and there were still long evenings to enjoy; still weekends. They took the train to Paris, booked into a poky hotel alongside the Gare du Nord and tried to find their way on foot to Notre Dame. They ended up footsore and cold in a café near Bastille. Azalea told him she wanted to go home.
‘I’ll get a taxi,’ he said.
‘No . . . not home to the hotel,’ she said. ‘Home. I want to go home.’
But where was home for Azalea Lewis? Not a poky hotel by the Gare du Nord, certainly – but was it a first-floor apartment in Highgate, or was it a bedroom with a horsehair mattress and views out over Loch Eck? Or was it, perhaps, a mission house high in the hills of a distant country, a country of heat and dust and conflict?
In February, she told him, at last, that she was returning to Langadi. It was an atrocious day. They’d planned to walk along the South Bank, to buy some second-hand books and visit a gallery. In the end they shivered in the window of a soulless coffee shop in a concrete block of a building and watched the sheets of rain wash up along the pavements. Thomas was preoccupied. His programmer and research assistant on The Coincidence Authority had gone home to India, and now there was no one who could so readily handle the maintenance of the website. He poured out his worries to Azalea, who sat avoiding his eyes. And then she said in a quiet voice, ‘I’m going back to Langadi.’
He blinked. Had he even heard her? ‘That’s nice,’ he said.
‘In twenty years I haven’t spoken or written to anyone from the mission,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know if the mission still exists. I expect it closed down when Luke and Rebecca were killed, but I don’t know for sure. I’m thirty-three years old. I’ve been running away from the place since I was thirteen. It’s time I went back.’
Thomas still didn’t get it. Not really. He simply bobbed his head. ‘Jolly good idea,’ he said. ‘Put a few demons to bed.’
Oh Thomas, Thomas. Why didn’t you say you would go with her? To hell with your stupid experiment. To hell with determination and free will. Why didn’t you sweep her up and march together to the travel agent and purchase two tickets? Why didn’t you buy some flattering shorts and a khaki safari shirt and some expedition sandals and a commodious rucksack and board that plane alongside her?
We can ask these questions of Thomas, but the truth remains: he sat in that coffee shop just a little bewildered and he vacillated.
‘I wonder,’ said Azalea, ‘if they all think I’m dead. I do wonder that sometimes. John Hall could have tracked us down. He knew we were at Kakuma, and the people at Kakuma knew how to contact Ritchie. But he never did. I wonder, sometimes, if John Hall ever made it back to Gulu. And even if he did, who would he have told? Luke and Rebecca were dead. He would have to have told Pastor David. I should have written to Pastor David, don’t you think? Don’t you think so, Thomas? I should have written to Pastor David.’
‘You could w
rite to him now,’ said Thomas.
‘He was sixty-something years old when I left,’ Azalea said. ‘He would be in his eighties now. I doubt if he’s still alive.’
‘So write to someone else,’ Thomas suggested.
‘I’ve searched for the mission online,’ she said, ‘but it doesn’t seem to exist.’
‘Well then,’ Thomas said; and he may have imagined that the crisis was over.
‘But that doesn’t mean anything, does it? It’s just a little farmstead on the Sudanese border. Why would they have a computer, let alone a website? The country’s had twenty years of civil unrest; they’ve had a God-almighty war to the north; they’ve had Joseph Kony stealing their kids and weaving his magic spells; they’ve had AIDS and TB and malaria and malnutrition. Why build a fancy website?’
‘They probably wouldn’t,’ agreed Thomas. ‘Or maybe the mission simply isn’t there any more.’ Maybe, he thought, when Luke and Rebecca died, everyone else gave up and the place was turned back into little parcels of farmland the way it had once been before progress and the white man ever found his way up the West Nile to Moyo District. ‘So who will you write to?’ Thomas asked.
‘I won’t,’ Azalea said. ‘I’ll fly into Entebbe and take a bus to Gulu, and then another bus to Moyo, and then I’ll get a bicycle taxi to take me ten miles to Langadi and then I shall walk up the main driveway and if no one is there, then I’ll knock on the door. Someone must be living in the mission house. It is too nice a place to be empty.’
‘And what about Kony and his people?’
‘From what I’ve read,’ said Azalea, ‘they’re still around, but not so active in Acholiland. Things are more peaceful now. Uganda had elections in March. Museveni is still in power, of course, but presidents in Africa don’t get thrown out by elections. Not often. The country has a fairly free press. Some vocal opposition. The place is getting back on its feet. And now the war in Sudan is over, well, anything is possible.’
‘Well,’ Thomas said, ‘I think it will be good for you. How long will you go for? A week? Two?’
Azalea looked out of the window at the grey curtain of rain and she thought of the red dust of Africa and the yellow sun and the dark green fields and the olive hills. She thought of the children in their blue uniforms and the women in the queue for water and Odokonyero and his cassava porridge. She thought of Anyeko and the goats, and the farm boys and Matron Maria. She thought of the bright fruit in the trees, and the scarlet flash of the gonolek bird, and the ding ding ding of the mission bell and the smell of fresh roasted coffee. She thought of the bedtime stories that Rebecca would read, and the songs that Luke would sing, and the sermons that Pastor David would recite and the hymns the congregation would chant. She thought of the multitude of voices, and the brightly coloured garments, and the billboards for Omo and Fanta, and the noise, and the smell of the two-stroke scooters. She thought of the lizards that would flicker up the walls, and the precious comfort of a mosquito net over the bed and the smell of pyrethrum spray at bedtime. And the images that had haunted her dreams for so long, for so very long, seemed on that grey morning in that grey concrete café to dissolve in the rain. The memory of the guns and the thumb ties and the cold, impassive faces of the boy soldiers. Those images had gone. The memories of the missile smashing into the truck, of John Hall shouting, ‘Run run RUN’, of the wall of flame and the deafening sound and the smell of burning; she could compartmentalise these memories now. Maybe this was the first time. Maybe she had been running all these years: running from Joseph Kony, running from the picture in her mind of Rebecca and Luke lying dead in the red dust of the mission yard.
Thomas was nodding his foolish approval, but he was a long way away. She knew now that he would never understand. He would never see what she could see, never hear the call that she could hear. He was stuck here in a city that was as cold and as wet and as unfriendly as a gravestone. He had once been engaged to be married, she recalled. But he had chosen this city. He chose to stay here. He was an anchor here, in this city of colourless rain, chained to the buildings, and his routine, and his work. He was an anchor she could never hope to reel in. It would be unkind to take him away from all of this. This was where he belonged, with his books and his numbers. She hadn’t seen it clearly until now. He was a tree stump in her path. Without knowing, she had always known. There was only one thing she could do, and she had to do it. Azalea scooped up her phone from the coffee-shop table and pulled her coat tight around her. ‘I’m sorry, Thomas,’ she said, ‘but I have to go.’
He was suddenly alarmed. ‘You have to go where?’ he said. He was reaching for his coat.
‘No, no, no.’ She reached out a hand to stop him. ‘I have to go,’ she said again.
He was confused now. ‘Wait. I’ll come. Where are you going?’
‘Please stay here. Please stay. Drink your coffee.’ She planted the briefest of kisses on his forehead. ‘I love you, Thomas,’ she whispered, and she held his head for a moment in her hands and took a long last look at his goofy face and his confused grin. ‘I love you. But I have to go. There will never be another time.’ She gave him a longer kiss, and then she pulled back. This was the Acholi way. This was the way that Luke had walked away from his brief rebellion in a street in Ladbroke Grove. Like the hyena she had been defeated by two roads, and her life had become one long equivocation. The time had come to choose a path and continue on running. She had run into a tree stump, but the stump hadn’t killed her. It had been one hell of a tree stump. It had been a stump of brutal abduction and violent liberation. It had been a long search for three fathers. But in the end, none had been her father. John Hall had rolled out of her life in the back of a truck. Peter Loak was trapped in his Lakeland cottage scribbling out his simple rhymes. And Gideon Robertson had embraced his destiny in the cold, unforgiving waters of the Irish Sea. Ritchie and Lauren were well on their way to happy-ever-after. And Thomas . . . Well, Thomas would always be Thomas, with his unfathomable research projects and his tables of statistics, with his laundry and his ironing and his afternoons of televised sport.
It was raining hard as she walked out of the coffee shop. On the Hungerford Bridge she drew her phone from the pocket of her coat and she cast it over the rail. Above the grey waters of the Thames a rainbow had formed. She looked at it with satisfaction. The hyena was on its way.
24
February 2012–June 2012
In the weeks that followed that rainy February day when Azalea Lewis had walked out of the riverside café, Thomas Post was forced to come to terms with the vacancy in his life that Azalea had created. Clementine Bielszowska might have recognised the symptoms, might have been able to offer a diagnosis of Thomas’s condition during those weeks. She might have referenced a familiar psychological pathway, the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross grief cycle. The five stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance – are not unique to bereavement; they can equally apply to personal life changes. In the case of Thomas Post, they could tender to the break-up of a relationship.
Denial, the first stage, infected Thomas even as he sat in the dismal coffee shop, even as Azalea’s final words to him echoed in his ears. He took his time, waited for the rain to abate and then he strolled east along the Thames pathway and across the river on the Millennium footbridge. Denial defined Thomas Post at this moment. He would give Azalea an hour or so to work out whatever it was that was bothering her, then he would telephone. Perhaps later they could meet up in Highgate. Maybe they might go to see a film. He walked the three and a half miles back to his flat, up past Shoreditch, cutting through the park to London Fields. In the park he tried to call her. Her number was unobtainable. Perhaps, he told himself, she was on the Underground somewhere. He didn’t leave a message.
He didn’t visit her flat that night. Nor the next. But something was up. Her phone, he decided, must be out of order. At lunchtime on the Monday he popped his head around the door of the little office at Birkbeck C
ollege. ‘Do you know where Azalea is?’ he asked of the round-faced, dreadlocked woman who had once slid a vase across a desk to accommodate his damaged flowers.
‘Apparently,’ said the woman, ‘she has resigned.’
‘Resigned? What do you mean . . . resigned?’ Denial.
‘I thought you might know about it.’ It was almost an accusation.
There was a removal van parked outside Azalea’s apartment building in Highgate that evening. Two men were heaving the last of a pile of boxes into the back. Thomas ignored the van – barely noticed it – as he pushed past to the front door and scaled the steps to Azalea’s flat. His key still worked, but the flat was bare.
Even denial on the scale of Thomas’s must admit some evidence to the contrary. He descended the steps two at a time. The removal van was pulling away from the kerb.
‘Wait!’ Thomas found himself knocking desperately on the window of the cab. ‘Where are you taking this stuff?’
One of the removal men slowly wound down his window. ‘Is it yours?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Thomas. ‘Yes . . . No . . . I mean, I know the woman who lived here.’
The removal man proffered a meaningful smile. ‘It sounds to me, mate, as if she doesn’t want you to know.’ The window slid back up.
Denial.
Trudging back to Highgate tube, Thomas tried to remember their closing conversation. What had Azalea said? Two weeks in Africa, wasn’t that it? Hadn’t she said she would be gone for two weeks? He could wait for two weeks. Two weeks would be nothing. Maybe, when she got back, she would move in with him. Maybe they would find a flat together.
But something was gnawing away at him. He was at that stage in the cycle when denial passes the baton onto anger.
The letter arrived at his house a week later, and was pushed underneath his front door by a neighbour. It seemed hastily written, in fading biro, on the notepaper of a Kampala hotel. Dear Thomas, it read.
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