The Memory of Love

by Forna, Aminatta

  A goal. He will have the frame ready before they go out to eat. He straightens to review his work, feels the ache and release, almost pleasurable, in his vertebrae and the muscles of his back, standing amid the cross-hatch of wooden beams as if upon a raft, the sharp scent of fresh timber mingled with the sting of salt.

  Elias Cole had not sent Babagaleh to Adrian in the weeks leading up to Adrian’s departure. Adrian passed by the old man’s room several times, to be told he was indisposed. He wondered whether he’d pushed him too far at their last meeting. Adrian said goodbye to Mrs Mara and the other members of staff, though he’d not seen Kai once. Kai was avoiding him, Adrian felt certain, and knew that he, too, was guilty of the same. He wasn’t entirely sure of the reason for his behaviour, which he had declined to examine too closely. Adrian is not, he tells himself, a jealous man. But then there was the sense, the constant sense he had had, of something lingering. How alike they were in many ways, Kai and Mamakay, like siblings really. In the way they both resolutely occupied only the present, kept doors closed, showing only what they chose to reveal. Both Kai and Mamakay had places from which all others were excluded, from which Adrian was excluded. Even now the fear coiling around his heart is that in those closed-off places is something the two of them share from their past, some arc of emotion, incomplete, requiring an ending.

  Is he doing the right thing? Sometimes he feels he is losing his mind.

  ‘Damn!’ A splinter of wood slides under the nail of his forefinger. The pain is pinpoint and exquisite. Adrian presses down on the bed of the fingernail and then sucks the end of his finger. The sky has a sulphurous cast; dark clouds boil on the horizon. Adrian’s mouth tastes of blood and iron. A drop of rain touches his skin and then another. Within moments the sand is turned dull and the pebbles sleek. Adrian collects the tools he has been working with and goes back inside the house.

  In the shower before dinner, hot water powering down upon his shoulders. He thinks of her at times like this. In the heat of the bathroom he could be in her apartment. He feels his body’s response, turns his face up to the shower-head, holds his breath. In his mind he watches her coming towards him. What does she do? A short time later he lets his hand fall back to his side, watches the semen swirl and slide away with the water. The outward tension, briefly, is dissipated, the yearning inside remains.

  The place is more of a restaurant than a pub, interconnecting dining rooms, tiled floor and green-painted dado rail. On the wall opposite Adrian is a portrait of a woman cast in a shadowy garden-room light, who might be Virginia Woolf. He watches his mother as she reads the menu through her spectacles. She has dressed for the occasion, exchanged her corduroys for a pair of velvet trousers and a velvet shirt. At the door a man, the restaurant’s owner, had greeted her with some familiarity, so Adrian thought. Adrian struggles to imagine his mother coming here. With whom? Who are her friends here? he wonders. He catches himself. The same challenge for every one of us, he thinks, to release our parents from the bondage of our own imagination. He lowers his head to the menu.

  His mother orders with confidence, Adrian less so, unsettled by so many choices. In the end he duplicates her choice, then changes his mind and orders local crab followed by duck. Several times he lifts his wine glass to his lips. He feels, if he is honest, a little detached from reality. Mamakay, Ileana, the wards of chained men, all there where he left them. He wonders about Adecali and whether his nightmares are troubling him, whether he is remembering to practise going to his special place. Practise, practise, Adrian told him before he left. Keep control of your own mind. The group sessions were planned to continue without him, the football games, though, had to be cancelled.

  What he appreciates about his mother, now he thinks about it, is that to her he can, if he chooses, talk about such things. Never does she make him feel as though his work, his dealings with the darker side of human lives, is something he must keep to himself, as if such talk was somehow embarrassing for polite company, did not go alongside goat’s cheese and Gressingham duck.

  He realises too that all this means nothing to him. Places like this restaurant, fine wines, he could enjoy it all but somewhere in the last year it had ceased to matter.

  An elderly couple make their way across the span of the dining room, telltale trembling in his limbs. Adrian feels his heart constrict. He glances at his mother and finds her looking at him.

  They take dessert and coffee in the bar, sitting side by side on a cushioned bench.

  ‘It made him so angry,’ his mother says, stirring crystals of brown sugar into her coffee.

  ‘What made who angry?’

  ‘Your father. His illness made him angry. It frustrated him. He took it out on you sometimes.’

  ‘He took it out on you as well.’

  ‘Oh.’ His mother picked up her coffee cup in both hands. ‘That didn’t bother me. I understood. There were so many reasons he was angry. The disease, the way it crippled him and took the years away. But I always felt he was angry for me, not angry with me.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘He was angry with himself, on my behalf. At the beginning he would disappear into these long, dark days. He felt I never should have married him. We came here a couple of times before we married. Of course, it was very different then. Your father had a motorbike when I met him; he bought a sidecar for it. I couldn’t squeeze into it once I was pregnant, but we kept it until the year after you were born. We took you out in it once or twice. We got stuck in the sand. Right here.’ She points with her spoon in the direction of the beach. ‘What a hoot! We came in here afterwards to dry off. They had rooms back then.’

  Adrian sits quietly for a moment. He cannot remember his father as anything other than brooding and intense. He has no memory of the sidecar, not unsurprisingly. He does, though, have a memory of a photograph of it, a man astride the motorbike and the empty sidecar. It was a black-and-white photograph with crenellated edges; they printed them smaller in those days. Odd he remembers it so clearly. It must have been taken with a camera that was already old. Adrian had always thought the image was of his grandfather. So it was his father. His mother, presumably, had been behind the camera.

  ‘And how did you feel?’

  ‘Me? I thought it was hilarious.’

  ‘I don’t mean about the sidecar. I mean, were you angry that he became ill?’

  ‘Only at God and the angels. We knew, you see. Even though the doctors misdiagnosed it at first. They thought it was thyroid-related. But your father had had an uncle with the disease and he reckoned he knew better and that the doctors were wrong. It turned out he was right. He never hid it from me. I was the one who insisted on the wedding. He was angry because the miracle we assumed would happen when we were young and in love never materialised.’ She smiles and stares into her cup, before setting it down on the saucer. She draws a finger across her dessert plate to collect the last of the cream, puts it in her mouth. ‘He couldn’t stop himself envying you, but he was so proud of you. If there’s one thing he would have wanted, it would be to see you become the person you were meant to become.’

  Three days later Adrian stands in front of the long window. The last of the moon is reflected in the silver of the sea. The darkness is giving way to dawn. A fine mist slips in and out of the faraway dunes. He slides open the door and steps barefoot outside on to the new deck. The scent of wood resin hangs heavy in the cool air. He walks down to the grass and then to the shoreline. He picks up a flat stone and sends it skimming across the surface of the water. One, two, three, the stone sinks out of sight.

  Six hours later he turns the wheel of his rental car, heads off the motorway on to the slip road and into the London-bound traffic.

  CHAPTER 51

  On a plastic seat in a row of others, Kai reads his most recent letters from Tejani:

  My brother,

  Today is the first day I have a chance to write to you. It’s been crazy busy. This is the first time in week
s I’ve even had half an hour to myself. I keep thinking I could email you and it would be so much quicker. But then I forget you have to go and wait who knows how long at an Internet café. Man, I don’t know how you put up with it. I can’t believe you still have to write all the records at the hospital by hand. So I guess then we stay with what we know. When you come over here we’re going to take some time to teach you how to use a computer properly. But truth is, friend, I don’t mind so much, even though there is only one place in the whole town that sells airmail paper. It gives me time to breathe.

  So I’m sitting at a table in the kitchen. It’s fall (as they call it here) and the weather is cold already. Man, once it starts, it eats into you. I need to get myself an attending position or maybe a fellowship somewhere warm. Atlanta, where it feels more like home. I hear there are a lot of our people in that part of the country. Not sure Helena is so keen on the idea, though. She’s working two jobs at two different care homes. She’s a hard worker and she’s making good money. We’re working towards that down payment. Helena says she wants to study, which I’m not saying I’m against, only we’re going to have to make a choice: the duplex or the college fees. So, anyways, we need to talk about that. Hey, you know what I’m thinking – I see an opportunity to exercise a little leverage here, persuade her to move south where the real estate is cheaper.

  So you saw big, beautiful Mary, who’s even bigger now. I take it Mamoud’s the lucky man. Tell them both congratulations. Hell, I love that woman. Tell her that for me. I don’t care if Mamoud gets jealous. Tell him he only has her because I allowed him and I might come back and take her away from him, so he better watch himself. Better treat her fine, because she’s one fine lady …

  A nurse, sullen and avoidant, steps out of the doctor’s surgery and resumes her place at her desk at the far end of the room without a glance at those waiting. Kai has been sitting there an hour already. The line moves at an interminable pace. A patient emerges from the doctor’s office, followed by the doctor himself, who calls the next patient’s name from his clipboard. A man with a large sore on his neck covered in a clot of strong-smelling herbs rises. Everybody shuffles along the bench. Kai waits. He’d chosen this clinic because of its distance from work, having decided not to do his medical at the hospital. So far only Mrs Mara knows he is leaving. Coming here seems like the simpler thing to do.

  He returns to the last lines of Tejani’s letter:

  When do you think you will get here? It seems to be taking a long time. You have to keep at them, man. Next thing you know they’ve lost all your paperwork. I would have expected you to be about ready to book your flight any time now.

  Another letter, dated some three weeks later:

  Hey, bro,

  No point asking when you’re coming. I guess it takes as long as it takes. No worries. The sofa is still here waiting for you.

  So maybe you heard about what happened here in one of the primary schools? It was all over the news for two days. Some crazy guy with a machete went into a kids’ playground at recess, Monday. Hacked a whole bunch of them, and the teacher too. Bad, bad stuff. Happens a lot here, so actually maybe the foreign press didn’t bother to report it. Anyway, the point of my mentioning it is this – guess where they brought the wounded kids? Right here. There were four of them. I had been on duty for about an hour when the call came in. Man, you should have seen me. I was flying. Nobody else round here could work out where I learned the stuff, how a junior like me gained so much experience working wounds like that. I didn’t say a word. Who would have believed me, if I said I learned it all during a war in Africa in a country you never even heard about? One of the kids was DOA, but the other three made it through. The chief of surgery asked for me to come see her and offered her congratulations. How about that?

  The real bad news is Helena and I split. Guess it had been coming a long time. So there you have it. No big drama, no arguments. She’s looking for a place to move into. In the meantime I’m sleeping most nights at the hospital. Though I can stay here if I want, I guess it’s easier not to. We had some good times together. I’m going to miss her.

  That’s it for now.

  Cheers, man,

  T.

  PS. If there’s anything you need me to do at this end, let me know.

  And the last letter:

  Dear Kai,

  I feel like I should start the letters ‘Dear diary’ or something, because it feels like you’re the only person I talk to. I don’t mean literally, because I talk to people all day. And I don’t mean I don’t have any friends. It’s just, there’s talking. And there’s talking. You know what I’m saying, right? No, of course you don’t. You were always the quiet one who drove the women crazy. I was the one used to think I had the gift of the gab, but the girls always went for you in the end.

  I’ve been forgetting to ask after Abass. Your kid cousin. How’s he doing? He must be coming up for about eight now. Shit! Can’t believe it. Tell him hi from me. Remember me to his mother.

  When you come here we should head up to Canada and pay your sister and your parents a visit. I should have gone before, only working for those exams kept me occupied. We could hire a car and drive. I’ve been wanting to do that. See the Niagara Falls. Hey, how do you think it compares with our very own falls back home? We had some good times there. Apparently there are people who go over the side of the Niagara Falls inside a wooden barrel. It’s true, man, I promise you. I’m not kidding. And do you know those falls freeze in the winter? I started to plan our trip and I saw a picture, a photograph from 1911. Frozen from top to bottom, the whole thing. There were people walking on the ice. Maybe we should go in the summer. Makes me laugh to think how excited I was the first time it snowed. I kept a jar of it in the freezer.

  Actually I haven’t done too much travelling. Money was short at the beginning. Also, my travel was restricted because of the way I entered the US. But it will be different for you. So now I guess I’m waiting, my friend. There’s a lot to see just around here. My first few months, man, I went around with my eyes popping. I don’t go out so much these days, but we can hit the town a few nights.

  Am sitting here wondering why I haven’t heard from you. Flash me and I can call you back. Or tell me when is a good time to call. It’s expensive, I know. Don’t worry about the money, let me call you. As soon as you get this letter. It would be good to hear your voice.

  Take care, man,

  Tejani

  Three times now Andrea Fernandez Mount had written to remind Kai he needed a medical, proof of his good health being the only remaining bar to his deliverance to the United States. She’d also written to tell him of his successful pass at the English proficiency test. So, he’d thought to himself, he could speak English after all. Well, that was always good to know. Kai turned the letters into a boat, an aeroplane and a pineapple and placed them upon the windowsill in his bedroom.

  ‘Mansaray.’

  Kai folds Tejani’s letters across the same dirt-lined creases, returns them to his back pocket and follows the doctor into the room. The doctor is a man in his fifties, grey-haired, dignified and tired. He reads the letter Kai had given to the nurse. If he is surprised by the contents, it does not show.

  ‘Take a seat.’

  Kai sits.

  ‘How do you feel?’ he asks. ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No complaints?’

  ‘None.’

  The doctor signs the bottom of a typed form and hands it to Kai.

  ‘Is that it?’ asks Kai.

  ‘What more do you want?’ The doctor shrugs.

  Kai stands. The doctor follows him to the door and calls the next patient.

  In the street Kai hails a taxi. Time is short. A cab pulls over and he checks the driver’s route, squeezes in next to the other passengers. At the US Embassy he drops down, enters the building, says to the marine, ‘Miss Fernandez Mount, please.’

  CHAPTER 52

  The rai
ns are over, seemingly fled the skies. Adrian feels the relief. The tide of red silt has cleared from the sea. The traffic speeds, the people slow. Today the patients are out in the sun raking the newly cut grass, a line of eight men bent at the waist. From his office Adrian watches Salia watching them, arms crossed, legs apart, white uniform spotless. At that moment Salia looks up, sees Adrian and raises a hand in salute. Adrian waves back. He turns away from the window.

  Somewhere out there in this city is Mamakay. What is she doing? He imagines her in the crowds at the market, searching out bargains among the stalls. In the mornings he encourages her to spend the money he has given her to furnish the house. But she moves slowly and reluctantly, and Adrian waits for her the way he has learned, like a horse whisperer, with his back half turned.

  He is happy. The new house, modest, white-painted but with good floors and a small garden, became theirs for a modest rent three weeks ago. The balcony at the back faces the mouth of a small river. Adrian worried about mosquitoes, but Mamakay assured him there would be none, and in this matter she has proved correct.

  He is happy. Each morning he wakes up to absorb the fact of his new life. A week last Wednesday, outside a supermarket, he saw the deaf boy again, the boy he had first seen at the police station, arrested for who knew what reason. The boy had recognised him. Adrian gave the boy a coin. The boy pressed the fingers of both hands against his lips, gestured towards Adrian and smiled. He watched the boy run back to his friends. When they’d first met, he and the boy, Adrian had been a different person. He feels this so strongly he wonders how the boy had even recognised him.