‘No father.’ Yeama nods as she says this, as if to confirm the wisdom of her own observation. ‘But he has a good mother.’
There is a general murmuring of consent; Kai hears his cousin’s voice thanking Yeama for the compliment.
Yeama continues, ‘And he has you, too.’ She nods at Kai then gives Abass’s arm a final pat and pushes him gently in Kai’s direction.
Nobody expects them to sit long with the women, and so after a few minutes Kai makes his excuses and leaves. He and Abass walk down the hill towards the house. The boy is silent, keeping pace with Kai in the darkness.
It is coming, Kai knows, one day soon. Every time somebody like Yeama makes a remark it brings the day a little closer. Inside Abass’s head he can sense the child’s brain working, trying to form thoughts out of feeling, thoughts which will in turn give rise to the questions, questions that have yet to crystallise.
One day.
Three o’clock in the morning. Kai listens to Abass’s adenoidal breathing. The child asked to sleep in his bed again. Now he is lying, leg bent, flung out across the middle of the bed. Kai stares into the darkness, then slips out of bed and goes into the yard.
Kai wasn’t woken by dreams about the bridge, or even a dream at all. But a memory, a sudden intrusion of conscious thought upon his world of sleep. The last time he saw Abass’s father, sitting on the tailgate of a pickup, on his way to his station in the east. He made the journey home twice a month. Just as the vehicle had been about to move off he’d jumped down to shake hands with Kai and climbed back in. He was always particular about his beret; Kai watched him adjusting it and readjusting it against the wind as the pickup gathered speed, wearing his habitual expression of peaceable wonder. In another world he would have been happy as a postman or a farmer.
Rebels invaded the town where he was stationed two weeks later. For days his blackened corpse, fused flesh and rubber, lay on a traffic island from where no person dared to retrieve it.
Perhaps, thinks Kai, he should talk to his cousin. Suggest it was time they thought about telling Abass the circumstances behind his father’s death. He ponders the question a few moments. His thoughts move to his cousin, to the Pentecostalists to whom she has given space in the house, the slight distance she keeps even from her own son. Abass craves her, turns to Kai in her absence. It is not Abass she is protecting. But who is Kai to judge her? For he’d never told Nenebah about the bridge. Or of what happened with the young nurse, Balia. He’d hidden those things from Nenebah.
One night, lying beside her in bed, sleepless, knowing she too was awake. He heard her draw a breath as she half turned towards him and placed her hand on his chest. She moved her hand down across his chest, her fingertips brushed his nipples, which tightened instinctively in response. Then her fingers were on his belly, the muscles of which contracted almost painfully beneath her touch. Kai held his breath. He shivered, held on to the tightness of his stomach muscles, diverted all his mental energy towards her hand and felt himself respond supremely to her advance, so that by the time her fingers snagged softly in his pubic hair he was fully erect. Her fingers found his cock and closed around it. He exhaled. For a moment he relaxed. And was lost. He tried to regain control, to re-engage his mind with his body, with her hand. But it was impossible, the images crowded into his mind, jostling for control, squeezing out the present. Even when she replaced her hand with her mouth, all he felt was her tongue working around his limp state. The entirety of him rested curled inside her mouth, an entirely new sensation. It was she who eventually came up, leant over and kissed him on the mouth. Neither of them spoke. She’d tucked herself under his arm and gone to sleep. It was still good enough between them for that.
A month later came Tejani’s announcement of his departure. They’d discussed it many times before, Tejani the determined one from the start. Kai had seen his friend off, punched fists with him and promised to follow. But he had never followed.
Close at hand a dog adds its voice to those of the others. Kai thinks of the day and the journey he now has before him. He does not lack the courage for it. No.
Rather it was the courage to stay that had failed him.
CHAPTER 35
‘How have you been sleeping? Any more dreams?’
Elias Cole laughs, a phlegm-filled rasp. ‘This is not the place for a good night’s sleep.’
‘You’re being woken?’
‘There’s always something, somebody dying or trying to. The doctors and nurses make it their business to interfere.’
‘Do you manage to sleep again?’
‘I wonder who’s next, afraid this sleep will be the final one. On the other hand, if the dream is good …’ The laugh again.
Adrian smiles. ‘I can ask the doctor to prescribe something, if you like.’
‘What would be the point?’
‘Let me know if you change your mind.’
‘Of course.’ He pulls himself up, in the slow, deliberate way of a man whose every movement is laced with pain. He coughs and the coughing takes over his whole body.
Adrian waits.
Elias Cole wipes his mouth with a cloth. ‘I’m not a superstitious man. I was born in the city. I don’t hold with Babagaleh’s country beliefs. For him there’s no such thing as a natural death, we’d all live for ever, but for the curses heaped upon us by our enemies.’ He looks up at Adrian. ‘In the dark all manner of thoughts come to mind. You begin to imagine.’
‘Imagine what?’
‘It’s something of a coincidence, is it not? The way I’m dying, so similar to Julius’s own end …’
‘And you think perhaps your pulmonary fibrosis is the result of a curse?’ Adrian shifts in his chair, interested. The old man turns, their eyes meet. Elias Cole smiles and in that moment looks suddenly quite different: keen, cold, alert. Adrian catches the glint in his eye. The side he sees of Cole is not his public face. Elias Cole had been quite a different animal on the outside, ten, twenty years ago. It occurs to Adrian he would not have liked to come up against him.
Adrian leans back.
‘Let’s just call it dramatic irony, shall we?’ says the old man.
Our first night together we dined at the Ocean Club. I felt people were staring at us. At a time when talk could have undesirable consequences, gossip filled the void. After we had eaten Saffia and I returned to the house on the campus.
The work on the house was finished and, on the whole, well executed. I guided Saffia from room to room. Some things still needed work. The stock of furniture that came with the property was underwhelming and looked as if it might have been chosen by a blind man. Curtains in a toxic shade of yellow. A wooden-framed sofa covered in red print. A chair covered in yet another brightly patterned fabric; it was a rocking chair, which we later discovered had a habit of overreaching its tipping point and depositing the occupant on the floor.
I was never a man of taste; the decor in my own apartment had never risen far above the merely functional. But Saffia had an eye for detail. And so in my imaginings I’d show her the house, newly roofed and painted. And then we would laugh together at the furnishings, and in the weeks that followed Saffia would make redecorating the house her first project. Or so I hoped.
She surveyed the room from the edge. Impossible not to notice how her gaze never alighted upon an object, but hovered restlessly. I made some quip or other, asking her opinion. A little game I had planned in which I pretended momentarily to admire the decor. Foolish, as it turned out. Saffia turned to me and smiled, held me in the same unseeing gaze with which she had contemplated the room, and said, ‘It’s a very fine house indeed, Elias. Thank you.’
Did she love me? I don’t think so. Did it matter? Not at the beginning. I thought by then Saffia had moved beyond ideas of love.
But I am a jealous man. I’d been jealous of my younger brother. Not so much for the fact of my mother’s love for him. It was his joy I envied, I suppose, the very quality that made people respond to hi
m as they did. He was an absurdly happy child, and I could never fathom why. I’d been jealous of Julius, for possessing Saffia. I’d even grown jealous of Kekura and Yansaneh. Of the dancer. Of any man who came near her.
Imagine then, how it feels to find yourself in a love triangle with a ghost. Your rival, complacent in death, can never misstep or disappoint. Julius had left Saffia, yet in dying he had at the same time atoned for all his sins, for his colossal selfishness and grandiose stupidity. And if I sound like I am contradicting myself, I am not. I merely describe the contortions of which the human heart is so eminently capable.
A memory.
Making love to Saffia.
I touch her back. For a few seconds, until she turns to me, she is utterly immobile. I kiss her. I caress her. She places her arms around me. But there is something held back. Her touch on my skin is altogether too light, as if she hesitates to make contact. In the moonlight that slips into the room from behind the blind, I see her eyes are open.
I remember Vanessa, her whispered encouragement and breathy endearments. With Vanessa I could succeed in losing myself. Vanessa had mastered the tricks of coquetry and seduction and she applied them to my pleasure. Vanessa could be a generous lover to those lovers who were generous to her. I remember the simulated passion of the girl from the bar. At least she showed me some gratitude. She admired me. A man needs some encouragement. I even feel a little tenderness towards her.
It is not true. I feel no tenderness towards the girl. A girl whose livelihood depended upon feigned pleasure. The same is true of Vanessa. Vanessa merely occupies a higher league, her ambitions greater and hence her abilities all the more finely tuned.
The truth, if you want it, was that it had never bothered me. I did not expect a woman to enjoy the act in the same way as a man. There was a time when these women were good enough for me. The act of lovemaking as performed with them was good enough. But no longer.
I am not comparing what I had with them to what I have with Saffia. It is all a lie.
Instead I am remembering a day. A day when I drove from the university campus to a pink house on the hill with a truckload of chairs for a party that evening. I cannot halt the memory. It enters my brain like a thief, slipping like the moonlight behind the blind.
I am remembering entering through the open door into the darkened recesses of the house. I am remembering standing alone in that wide, open space listening to a sound. A sound coming from somewhere behind a closed bedroom door. I am remembering the coarse humour and laugh of the truck driver. And I am remembering the heat rising in my face.
And this, the truth now, is what I was thinking. That, until the truck driver laughed his filthy laugh, I had been unable to place the sounds we both heard. They were unfamiliar to me because I had no idea what a woman’s pleasure sounded like. And when I heard it for the first time that day it sounded nothing like Vanessa. And I knew. I knew what Vanessa had been doing to me and I was angry. I heard the visceral reality, wild, abandoned, unheeding and unmistakable.
That is what I remember as I lie with Saffia.
Despite myself, the memory arouses me. But Saffia does not feign her pleasure. The anger returns, it rises and keeps me going. I become frenzied.
And suddenly I am spent.
There came a time when I became jealous even of Saffia, what she kept inside and would not share. My jealousy – frustrated and unappeased – transformed into anger, a low, unworthy rage. I wished to break her. At mealtimes I would sit watching as she chewed her food, observing the working of her jaw, the way she swallowed. For a while it became a minor obsession. I watched her surreptitiously as she moved around the house, as she read a book, sewed or made a shopping list. If ever she happened to turn in my direction and see me looking, she would smile at me, that skin-deep smile with which I had become so familiar. And I would smile back. I watched her at other times, too. In the old days I might have contrived to bump into her in this place or that place, discover her plans and make sure they coincided with mine. Now I tried and failed to catch her out in small lies and evasions. I read meaning into even the most open statement. I looked through her papers and belongings. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I suspected her of nothing at all, except of not caring for me. Meanwhile she ran the house, planned my meals, attended to every domestic duty; she listened and replied to my conversation. That was what made it so terrible.
A Tuesday. I’d been working in my office all morning. The short walk to work was one of the conveniences of living on campus. Sometimes on my way between the library and the office I would walk the hundred yards up the hill. I could tell if Saffia was home by whether or not the car was parked outside. I might wander up there two or three times a day. Thanks to my recent promotion I was less and less often to be found among the archives. I still lectured and I still researched and wrote, but more of my work was now made up of administrative duties. I didn’t complain. It suited me, to be honest. Simple, measurable and on the whole achievable goals. I kept in touch with developments in the academic world; over the years I published several papers. One of them, on early monetary systems, achieved significant critical praise and contributed to my eventual professorship. Though all that was yet to come.
The car was in the drive. I was about to turn away when I saw Saffia leaving the house, her head wrapped in her distinctive orange scarf. She didn’t get into the car and drive off, as might be expected. Instead she set off in the opposite direction, across the campus. After a moment’s hesitation I followed her. I followed her all the way to the eastern gate of the campus. The entrance was little used for the simple reason it was a long walk from the main campus buildings. However, it enjoyed the advantage of leading straight into a parade of houses and shops, one of the old Creole villages. It was an alternative place to pick up transport. Saffia hailed a taxi, slipped inside and drove off.
At dinner that night I asked her about her day. I noticed she said nothing about her trip outside the campus.
The next day I called Babagaleh. He was with us by then. Sent from the village by the aunt, though altogether a much more amenable personality. Much easier for Babagaleh to go unnoticed. There was a risk involved in my request. He was one of Saffia’s people, his loyalty to me was untested. I forget how, but I made it sound as though it was all being done for Saffia’s sake. A hint that I was concerned for her health.
Babagaleh acquitted himself well. The first two days she did nothing more than pursue her regular errands. Babagaleh was, rather I should say is, a man of minimal speech. One of his better qualities is his ability to resist the urge towards embroidery and irrelevance people of his class so often possess and which they seem unshakeably to believe will be read as empiric evidence of their efforts. Babagaleh knew what was required of him. He watched, he waited, and when he had the information he delivered it to me plainly. In his own words, she had been to the house where she had once lived with Mr Julius.
Interesting he knew the detail, because as far as I knew he had never visited the house before.
The dry season was at its height. The view of the hills from the town had virtually disappeared and the sun looked more like the moon, pale behind the veil of dust. I remember it was January because that was also the month of the faculty wives’ dinner.
That year, the one I am talking about, it was a cool evening; gusts of desert wind blew through the gathering. The Dean, naturally, was there and we spoke for a few minutes until he left us to go and work the room, as was his way. His efforts would pay off when ten years later he was appointed Vice Chancellor.
One thing of note occurred: Saffia was unwell later in the evening. She’d been drinking, brandy and ginger ale. I put it down to her inexperience with alcohol.
This had all been in the days before I noticed Saffia leave the house with her orange scarf wrapped around her hair. I wondered why she didn’t take her car. Now the decision made some sort of sense. She still drove the Volkswagen Variant. It wouldn’t do to draw a
ttention to herself on her old street.
I considered my alternatives. I decided to pursue my own line of enquiry.
One afternoon I made my way to the pink house. It had been two years since I’d last visited, three since Julius had died. Not much had changed. The neighbour, the fish mammy as I thought of her, was still in residence. At least her chair occupied the same place upon the verandah and I thought I heard her voice coming from behind the house. The orange tree in the yard was overgrown, the branches bowed. The door of the house was solidly locked. New tenants had arrived after Saffia and her aunt left. I supposed they must have moved on and the landlord had his own plans for the place.
The whole place had an air of neglect. What was it that made it so? The darkness at the windows? The absence of tread upon the stone stairs, now covered in dust? Or just the inexplicable lack of a life force. The pink house was utterly still.
I walked down the side of the house, where I knew there could be found a small gate. It had been rarely used, except by Saffia when she was delivering the potted plants and hanging baskets she sold for weddings and other events. The gate opened easily. Somehow this was exactly as I knew it would be. The garden was ordered and neat. Somebody had been here recently. The thought entered my mind that the landlord had employed a gardener while the house was empty. As I walked on I knew the idea carried no weight. No doubt at all, this was Saffia’s doing. I made my way down the path to the end of the garden and back into the past. The place I had stood drunkenly under the tree and stared at the stars on the night of the moon landing. Where I had stood with Saffia before the Harmattan lilies in the first weeks of our meeting. And again two years ago, when she had briefly alluded to the possibility of a future and my heart had crowded with hope.
The lilies were splendid. Dozens of them, deepest crimson, their great funnel-shaped heads turned towards me. Can a flower adopt an expression? I ask because I know you will think me fanciful if I say so, or thought so then. Standing there, it was as though I had opened a door upon a roomful of silent children: watchful, listening, waiting. I knew I had found what I’d been looking for. I turned to go.
The Memory of Love Page 34