After Adecali is gone Adrian, halfway through writing up his notes of the session, puts down his pen, stands up and goes to the window. The fishing canoe is gone. A freight liner is moving, almost imperceptibly, across the horizon. If only it were so easy to rewind the past, he thinks. To where might he return? How far back would he go? What, if anything, would he change?
For nearly six months now Adrian has been listening to Elias Cole’s story; Cole has been using him as a confessor. The question is why. In Adrian’s experience it isn’t unknown for a patient endeavouring to conceal an uncomfortable truth – from themselves as much as anyone else – to confess to something lesser. The therapist is handed the role of judge and juror. If he accepts the version of events presented, the patient sees himself as absolved.
So what is Elias Cole’s real story?
Inside his room Elias Cole is being given a bath. He lies naked to the waist while Babagaleh holds up an arm, sponging the underside with water from a large basin on the side table. The older man’s thinness is pitiful, the shadow of his ribs visible either side of the sternum. The slack skin falls away from the bone, a cloth slung over a heap of sticks.
‘Stay, stay,’ as Adrian prepares to withdraw. ‘Babagaleh is finished here, anyway.’ He indicates to Adrian to sit. And to Babagaleh, ‘Go away now. Come back later.’
Babagaleh dries the old man off, pulls the bedclothes up over his chest and folds them over neatly. Unhurriedly he gathers up the basin, soap and towel and leaves the room.
‘How are you?’ says Adrian. No sign of the oxygen concentrator today. Mrs Mara must have had it repossessed.
‘As you see. I have been unwell, but now I am a little improved, though my trajectory remains in the same general direction.’ He smiles thinly. ‘How are you?’
‘I am well, thank you.’
‘You look a little different, somehow. Let me look at you.’ Cole cocks his head and regards Adrian. ‘You are looking rather solemn, if you don’t mind my saying so. I hope everything is all right.’
‘It is,’ says Adrian, summoning a smile. He draws his chair closer to the bed, decides to get straight to the point. ‘Have you heard of the Prisoner’s Dilemma?’
‘The Prisoner’s Dilemma? Yes, I am loosely familiar with the theory. Though it has been some time now.’
‘What do you understand from it?’
‘Two men are being held in jail for the same offence. The police don’t have enough evidence to make a charge, so instead they make a deal with each man to inform on the other. It is the same deal, the broad result of which is that, if each stays silent, then each is convicted of a lesser charge. If one gives information about the other, he will get off, but the other man will suffer an even greater penalty.’
‘That’s right,’ says Adrian. ‘And if they both confess, they will get a sentence longer than if they remain silent, but shorter than if one has been informed on by the other.’
‘You are talking about me and Julius.’
‘Game theory. That particular form of the game was devised by a mathematician in 1950 or thereabouts. It’s been in play ever since.’
The old man inhales and then exhales slowly. ‘I see.’
‘It’s a non-zero-sum game as opposed to a zero-sum game. It allows for the possibility of cooperation. There’s a move that benefits both players.’ He watches Elias Cole’s face carefully.
‘Yes, as I said, I’m familiar with the theory. I’m not sure how it relates to me and Julius, except that we were, quite literally, prisoners. The point you’re missing, of course, is that I could not confess to anything as I was not involved in anything. So that option was not open to me. I followed the only recourse there was.’
‘Of course,’ says Adrian. ‘I understand that perfectly. Let’s stick with the game for the time being. You see, it really concerns questions of self-interest and betrayal. If Prisoner A decides to act in his own self-interest he wins.’
‘But only if the other prisoner doesn’t do the same thing.’
‘Precisely, if the other prisoner does then they both lose. Unless of course Prisoner A knows Prisoner B is unlikely to betray him. It puts Prisoner A in a strong position. It’s really quite fascinating. It isn’t just mathematicians and philosophers who are interested in the outcomes. Economists, too. Rival companies manufacturing, oh, I don’t know, soft drinks, dog food. They have to decide whether it’s better to price fix or compete.’
Elias Cole grunts. His gaze flicks over Adrian and settles on the end of the bed.
Adrian stands up and moves into his eye line. ‘There are variants of the game. In the most popular the two people play the game repeatedly. That way they can learn each other’s responses, you see.’
‘Indeed I do, though I’m still not at all sure where you are headed with all of this. I did nothing wrong except to give Johnson what he asked for, which was a small amount of information. I did not lie, or manufacture evidence. Johnson was a police officer.’
‘Though you knew what kind of man he was.’
‘He was a police officer, for heaven’s sake!’
‘As I was saying, in this variant of the game, the same people play each other any number of times. They get to know how the other one is likely to respond, but also they get the opportunity to punish each other for past betrayals. So suddenly the game shifts quite dramatically.’
Cole does not respond, he is watching Adrian. Adrian looks directly into the void of his stare.
‘So let’s say that now we are talking about you and Julius. Could it be you were punishing him for a betrayal, one already committed?’
‘And what betrayal is that?’
‘The one you told me about the last time we spoke. For not including you in what was going on.’
Elias Cole gives a short, harsh and derisive laugh. ‘What? For not involving me in producing some rag of an underground newspaper?’
‘You seemed upset enough about it last time.’
‘I was angry with him precisely for getting me involved. For using my room and my typewriter. For letting me be arrested.’
Adrian is quiet for a moment. ‘For not trusting you enough to tell you what was really going on. You thought you were closer to him than you really were. But it turned out not to be true. Yansaneh, Kekura – they were Julius’s real, trusted friends and not you.’ He’s heckling the old man now. He ought, perhaps, to stop but he doesn’t want to. He throws in one final sentence. ‘So you gave Johnson your notebooks.’
‘Yes, I gave Johnson my notebooks. But not for the reason you suggest. Because Johnson had harassed and humiliated me.’
‘Did you feel better when you had done it?’
‘Of course not!’
Half an hour later Adrian walks down the corridor towards his apartment, thinking about Adecali and Elias Cole, two very different conversations. He hardly dares admit it to himself, but he’d rather enjoyed sparring with Elias Cole. The old man maintained that giving Johnson his notebooks did not amount to an act of betrayal and certainly he could tell himself that, he might even partly believe it. Johnson, after all, represented the law, the arm of authority. But Cole was holding back. He had cooperated with Johnson, but something that occurred around that time had created a bond which had lasted years after the event, of this Adrian felt reasonably certain.
As for the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the game theory had once comprised a seminar when Adrian was at university. In the present circumstances, as an analogy, it is remarkably apt. But what is most interesting about it is that, although at first glance self-interest and betrayal seem to be the winning choice, what happens when the game is played repeatedly among large numbers of people, or even by computers, is that altruism becomes the sensible recourse.
Adrian recalls the lecture theatre, the strip lighting and 1960s concrete flooring. His professor, what was the guy’s name? Quinnell. Proving, Quinnell had told them, rocking forwards on the lectern, that in any society good moral thinking and self-int
erest are one and the same.
There comes a time when the knowing makes itself known.
When they make love he finds he cannot bury himself deeply enough inside her. He pushes his face into her neck and tastes skin, salt and sweat. A leg is pressed against his cheek. Hands grip his arms. His chin fits in the dip above her collarbone. He reaches up and finds her calf, her ankle. Her hand slides between their two bodies and gathers his balls. He, who has ceased to breathe, exhales his soul.
Afterwards she plays with parts of him. Licks a nipple. Curls a hair around a forefinger. Inspects an insect bite and gives it an experimental squeeze. Grooming him, he teases her. Once she even scratched the back of his knee. Later, when he thought about it, he shook his head and swore to himself he had said nothing of the itch he felt there.
In these idle moments, to him anything but mundane, the physical separation between them ceases to exist.
And this is where he is when the knowing makes itself known. He is lying on his front across her bed, trapped by her leg cast across the back of his thighs. Outside the night-time rain has started, weighted drops tumbling out of the sky subduing all other sounds. When she rises to fetch a glass of water, he feels a moment of loss and he knows he never wants to be without her again and he says so. But she, standing with her back to him, fails to hear above the rain and the sound of pouring water and so gives no answer.
She turns around. ‘What’s the matter?’
He sees his mistake, struggles out of the terror the thought of rejection brought with it and repeats his words. ‘I want you to come with me when I leave.’
She sits and places a hand on his back. She is silent and he hates it, starts to slide towards the fear once more. ‘I don’t want that,’ she says.
He drops his gaze.
‘This is my home. This is where I want to live. I want to raise our children in this place.’ The last three words pronounced emphatically.
He is overtaken by relief. Aware of his breathing, of the wild thumping of his heart, he makes an effort to bring both under control. He pulls her to him. For now he doesn’t want to think about the rest. Nothing is simple, except this one thing, this feeling he has for her.
Children, she said. Our children. He has already forgotten the rest.
Outside the rain crashes down, dulling the senses. Next comes the thunder. Adrian closes his mind to everything but her touch.
For now everything else can wait.
CHAPTER 49
An inventory of his clothes: T-shirts in various stages of wear, thirteen. Acceptable, five. Pairs of jeans, three. Good shirts, two. Kai slips on one of the shirts he last wore to the party after his high-school graduation and can scarcely button it across his chest. He places it on the pile of clothes by the door.
On his way to the British Council, he stops by Government Wharf, where bales of second-hand clothes are unloaded from ships. From a trader he selects two shirts, nearly new. Also a pair of trousers, creased but serviceable. He pulls his T-shirt over his head and changes into one of the shirts there on the street. The trousers he folds over his arm, pays the vendor and heads up the hill to the Council building. In the men’s toilets he changes into his new trousers and then doubles back to reception, where he explains to the girl behind the desk he has come to take the English language aptitude test. There are twelve other candidates in the room, though nobody he knows. The receptionist hands out the papers and leaves. The first three pages of questions are multiple choice. Select the correct verb-ending from the list below. Select the correct noun from the list below. A man in a grey three-piece suit chews his pencil, applies slow strokes of pencil to paper. Kai flips through pages. The last question requires a short account of a recent news item. Kai, who has not listened to the news in months, writes of the terracotta armies in China. He does not review his work but collects up his papers and leaves, handing them to the girl at reception as he goes.
Less than fifteen minutes have elapsed since he entered the examination room.
So now he is free until midday. He’s about to leave the building, when he changes his mind and ascends the stairs to the library. The whole place has been remodelled since he was here last, though the smell of clean air and paper remains. As a child he passed hours in here looking at the medical books, not to thumb through to explicit images like the other kids, but to stare at the diagrams, repeat to himself the Latin names of bones, muscle, tissue, organs.
To the librarian he mouths, ‘History,’ and is pointed to the back of the room. Africa. Europe. Oceania. India. China. He finds what he is looking for among the outsize books: The Terracotta Army of Emperor Qin Shi Huang. The book is more than fifteen years old, does not contain the most recent findings; still, the images are various and in colour.
At the front desk Kai waits while the librarian searches among the index cards for his old membership number, hunts and pecks the letters of his name on the computer keyboard. He moves away to browse the periodicals.
There, standing in the narrow aisle, he sees her. She is working at one of the desks facing the wall, her back to him, head bent over a book. Several other volumes sit upon the floor by her foot, two more next to her elbow. Her chin is cradled in the palm of her hand. With her free hand she flicks the end of her scarf over her shoulder, with a gesture so utterly familiar it nearly winds him.
For a year nothing, now twice in a matter of weeks.
For all of those months he had lived inside the cold, bright tunnel of medicine. Once he’d passed her standing at the roadside, her arms full of books. He did not wave or call to the driver to stop. Instead he sped past, away to a future without her.
Now Kai stands and watches Nenebah. It would be so easy to speak to her. He should tell her, perhaps, that he is leaving. After all those arguments. Now none of it matters. And yet what of consequence can he tell her in just a few minutes, here in a public library? What can he say that would make any difference? He should tell her about that night on the bridge, the days before and after. At the time he had closed in upon himself, denying her a place of entry. She was tenacious, aggressive as a lover, had tried to prise the pieces of him apart. Only when she failed had she finally let go; by then months had passed. She loved like she was going to war, but she was also not the kind of woman to wait for a man. Valiant in battle, noble in defeat. She walked away and never looked back.
As with all the most traumatic injuries, the pain followed later. He’d tried to find her, to go back to her. By then she’d left her father’s house and was moving around the city. He went to find Mary, but Mary had gone too. In the scale of what had happened in the city, the echoes of which were still ringing through the streets, Kai had felt shamed. He went back to work. And had never stopped working since.
Now he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
But what of Adrian? Kai might have told himself the relationship with Adrian was meaningless, had he not known that with Nenebah nothing was meaningless. She brought an intensity to everything she did. Whereas for Kai, only one thing really mattered and that was medicine. And Nenebah. Two things mattered, nothing else.
She shifts in her chair and the movement brings him back to himself. He is about to go to her, but still he hesitates and remains standing in the aisle, holding on aware in some distant, unconscious way, of balancing upon an axial moment in his life. With the first step he will put into motion a sequence of events that will play out into the future. The ramifications are enormous. He made a mistake in letting her go. Now he wants to go back. It is not too late.
Somebody comes down the aisle, and Kai steps aside to let them pass. As he does, his view of Nenebah alters. For the first time he can see the pages of the book open on the desk in front of her. The person who passed him has stopped further down the aisle. Kai waits for them to move on. He angles his head so he can see what Nenebah is reading. From this distance he can just about make out a diagram, the figure of a woman, a pregnant woman. Kai looks down to the books on the flo
or. The volume on the top of the pile shows a picture of a child held in its mother’s arms. Something for Mary, perhaps? Mary was probably too busy to visit the library, she might have asked Nenebah to look something up for her. Even as Kai tells himself this, he knows it isn’t true. In front of him Nenebah stretches and flexes her spine, before relaxing back into position. More telling than the visible swell of her stomach is the way she touches it with her right hand, a slow, circular caress, before she turns another leaf of the book.
The library, the shelves, the strip lighting have all disappeared. Kai cannot hear, he is in a deafening tunnel of wind. He reaches out and holds on to a shelf. Inside his mind he is rushing backwards, away from the place in his mind he was only moments before, the place from where he had seen the possibility of a future with Nenebah. The man in the aisle is looking at him. Kai concentrates on closing the thoughts off, one by one. Realigning his whole being. His command of himself is almost total; it is an effort of will.
And when control has been resumed he turns and walks back to the front desk, where he picks up the book for Foday.
For an hour Kai walked the streets, carrying with him the great book on the model armies of China. Now he understands the reason for Mary’s look. It wasn’t the fact of Nenebah having another man, for in Mary’s mind such matters were always reversible. But a child, a child was something different.
He hails an empty taxi. He is in no mood now to return to the hospital. He directs the driver out towards the west of the city, to the bars along the beach, promises him sufficient fare not to take other passengers.
Sitting at a bar, one he has never been to before, Kai orders a beer and sits with the book upon his lap, staring at the horizon. After a few sallies the barman has abandoned his attempts at banter. Now the man sits on the opposite side of the bar, staring as moodily as Kai at some unknown point.
A white woman is walking up the beach, dressed in tight black shorts and trainers, a ponytail pushed through the back of her baseball cap, arms bent like a jogger, her chin pointed forward and her backside pushed out behind her. Kai watches as she heads up the beach, the ponytail swinging from side to side like a metronome. About a hundred yards further on he sees her turn back on herself. He is still watching her as she heads up the beach towards the bar. She sits on a stool and orders from the barman. She is not, Kai thinks, especially pretty, though she behaves otherwise, flicking her blonde ponytail and wriggling on the bar stool. Any minute now she will start to talk to him, begin to ask him questions and demand that he reveal himself to her. Before such a thing can happen he places the book on the bar, swings himself off his stool and heads out across the sand towards the water. At first his intention is to do no more than walk along the line of the surf. But the sand is hot underfoot. He feels constrained by his shirt and undoes a few buttons at his throat and then a few more, before he removes it altogether. Trousers and flip-flops follow. In his shorts he walks down to the water and through the crashing surf. A wave breaks against his thighs, forcing him to brace. When the wave recedes he continues his assault upon the ocean for several more paces, before he puts his arms above his head and dives into the next wave.
The Memory of Love Page 44