by Claire Hajaj
The heavy embrace of drugs was pulling Nick down to a place without voices or questions. He struggled against it with all his strength. ‘Where is JoJo?’
‘Safe,’ J.P. answered, as Nick fell back into the dark. ‘Saved, thank God.’
At last the police came. Nick travelled south in the back of an armoured van, bandages white against his hands and stomach. A young officer sat beside him, nodding in sleep. The land was wide and bright, the horizon brushed with gold. The hard world dissolved as they rushed through it, melting back into life.
The deputy consul had a balding crown and an air of practised sympathy. He talked earnestly about arrest warrants and extradition processes as Nick watched a fly dance over the drifting brown hairs. When asked whether he would rather face charges here or at home, Nick saw the fly settle, translucent wings tense with daring.
‘Home,’ he answered. ‘I want to go home.’
Weeks of waiting stretched ahead of him. He spent them in detention, making regular calls to Kate and taking visits from J.P. and Eric. Kate wept down the phone; it was the first time he’d ever heard her cry. Why didn’t you talk to me? Why didn’t you say something? He had no answers; he felt like a child, re-learning a lost language.
J.P. and Eric were easier. They brought newspapers and cans of cola and chocolates to share with the guards. His room was quiet and clean, the routines strangely relaxing. They talked about the weather – the end of the drought – their words flowing over the surface. They asked nothing and Nick demanded nothing in return.
Only once, as Eric was leaving, something lifted from the depths: ‘Who else died?’
Eric paused. ‘A few. It could have been worse. Tuesday and one of his girlfriends. The elder boy of Kamil’s. Miss Amina and that maid whose field burned – Hanan, Adeya’s mother. Some of the older boys who tried to fight back. They say around twenty in all. That old witch out by the lake. By the time Danjuma’s men arrived, it was all over.’
Nick nodded, wordless. Twenty names, thrown down into the dark.
‘Danjuma is even going to fix your bloody well. It’s his well now, of course. There’ll be rationing or similar. But he has big plans – irrigation systems, agriculture. A swimming pool, so I hear. He’s draining the lake. You won’t recognise the place soon.’
A swimming pool. Nick would have laughed if there’d been any laughter left in him.
‘And what about JoJo?’ His fingers clenched the desk, feeling the bite of metal and wood. ‘Where is he?’
‘He’s fine.’ Eric’s eyes met his. ‘Dr Ahmed’s sister took him – the one who lives in the Town. She has all three of them. JoJo and the little girl and Adeya, too. They’re going to a private school, a fancy one for rich kids. Danjuma is setting up a fund. They’ll get the best of everything. Medical care, university – all the trimmings.’
‘JoJo always wondered why his father wasn’t good enough to work in that hospital.’ Mentioning Dr Ahmed was like breaking a spell. Margaret’s name he could not yet say.
‘Well, if the boy wants to be chief surgeon now, I guess he will. Adeya too. She’s getting those hands of hers fixed. They’re both smart kids.’
Nick nodded. Exhaustion washed over him – and something else, harder to define: the numb relief of a drowning man who finally surrenders his struggle for air.
‘I took everything from them.’ The words came before he could stop them, burning his throat.
Eric stood for a moment considering this.
‘When you left me that night, I thought you were fucking stupid. Throwing your life away for nothing.’ He shrugged. ‘But as it turns out, who knows? There could have been more than two bodies in that house.’
That night Nick cried himself to sleep. He dreamed he stood at the lake, rigid and tall. Dr Ahmed sat in quiet contentment at his feet, Margaret laughing over by the bright water, beckoning to him. Something inside was broken; his heart was still and locked in silence. Wake! He willed it to beat with every fibre of his being. Wake up! And then from somewhere he heard a voice. I am coming! JoJo was running to him, breathless, a screwdriver in his hand. Look, Nicholas! I came back!
And then the last day came, and there was no time left.
Nick stepped out of the detention centre, carrying a small bag of possessions. The police car drove him to the airport under the boughs of blossoming trees. The traffic sang, horns and voices spreading cheerfully through the smoke. He looked upwards, to the wisps of vanishing cloud. A line of birds followed them; he watched the silhouette break the air like ripples on water.
English police officers met him at the terminal doors, their faces puffy with heat and sleep. One crossed meaty arms over a stomach bulging from black trousers. The other was well muscled, head shaved to gleaming baldness.
They handcuffed him after the customs formalities. ‘For the look of it, mate.’ One hand on his back, another on his arm. He remembered the baby goat across Jalloh’s shoulders, helpless and trusting on its way through the garden.
Finally they stood on the runway under the sun’s blaze.
The plane ahead was white and lean as a swan. People queued on the stairway to the open cabin door, a trailing line of colour.
The hands were heavy on his shoulders, and the sun dazzled his mind. What happened, Nicholas? What did you do? If he closed his eyes he could still sense Dr Ahmed’s room where he’d lain next to Margaret’s body, still feel himself there beside her, more vivid than a memory. It was almost enough to make him believe he’d never left her – that this odd and empty world around him was nothing more than the soul’s journey of penance, some strange, dying dream. But a cold voice told him it wasn’t so: a nameless force had propelled him out of the door that night, driving him away from Margaret through the fires and Mister and Binza and then abandoning him there like a stopped clock. And he could neither thank it nor blame it, for he could not understand its purpose.
Another car was pulling up beside them. Its brown sides were marked with the red stripe of the police force.
A door opened and a uniformed woman hoisted herself out, saluting her colleagues. Nick’s eyes followed her as she walked round to the rear doors. There, she stopped, looking into the back seat. Her hand rested lightly on the doorhandle, as if waiting for a sign from within.
Firm hands returned to his shoulders; he looked back along the tarmac towards the waiting plane. ‘Come on, mate,’ someone said. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are. You could have been stuck here.’
Somewhere a machine’s roar cut off, pitching them into a sudden gulf of silence. The absence of noise pressed on Nick’s ears like a vacuum; through it, he heard the faint echo of birdsong. A woman’s shape mesmerised him, curved against the light like a question mark. He realised he was holding his breath.
The policewoman stepped back; then the car door swung open, pushed from the inside. Nick squinted at a figure moving in the back seat. As he watched, it separated into two smaller forms, their arms tangled around each other.
‘JoJo.’ Something moved within him, a thump of emotion like the first turn of an engine.
JoJo would not look at him. His long legs unfolded as he climbed slowly out of the car. Nagode clutched onto his arms. Nick saw her twist around in confused recognition.
The last signatures were being scribbled onto papers transferring custody. Noon was nearly on them, the sun at its zenith. It traced the balanced lines of JoJo’s face, the new definition of his jaw. The battle between child and man had been blasted away, revealing equilibrium beneath.
‘JoJo,’ Nick said again, softly.
JoJo handed Nagode to the policewoman. He dug his hands into his back pockets.
Nick felt his captors pulling him backwards, towards the plane. I’m not ready. His chest pounded; he could still feel the echo of two other hearts beating within him, pumping life through his veins.
‘JoJo, please.’ He resisted the pressure dragging him away. ‘Please.’ He’d promised never to ask for anything, n
either absolution nor understanding. But JoJo’s silence undid him. And now he felt it – the staggering weight of loss, a profound emptiness in hands that had once been full. Love stays with the living. That’s what he’d told her – but now she was gone, and he could not feel her at all except through this crushing, brutal pain. His knees almost gave way with the weight of it, unable to put it down, but knowing it was more than he could bear.
It was too much; he wrenched his body away from them, turning towards the plane.
But then he heard his name. ‘Nicholas.’
JoJo was looking straight at him, eyes meeting Nick’s through the sun’s brilliance. The young man’s hands emerged from his pockets, holding something out towards him. It lay at the edge of his fingers, a dark shape in a pool of light.
Bako’s bracelet.
JoJo walked towards him, shaking off the policewoman’s warning grasp. The birds wheeled and called as Nick reached out with his cuffed hands. And then he felt the beads fall like an abacus into his palm.
They curled there, small dots of red. All the good deeds, and all the bad, he remembered. One for JoJo, one for Adeya, one for Nagode. He ran his fingers over each smooth surface, his mind making its own count. One for Dr Ahmed. One for Binza, one for Mister. He touched the first and last, bringing the two ends of the cord together. One for Margaret. And one for me.
He looked at JoJo, who looked back, eyes solemn.
‘Are you sure?’ Nick asked.
JoJo shrugged. He bit his lip, a gesture so like his mother’s that Nick’s whole being thrilled with sudden joy.
They stood in silence, the crows reeling above them. Then, JoJo reached over. He touched the beads lightly – tentative fingers hovering just above Nick’s hand.
‘I fixed Baba’s clock already. Adeya helped me.’ His voice was deeper now, but quiet. Nick felt the electric pressure of his fingertips, the inexpressible passing through a world of flesh and blood. ‘Adeya and me, we went back to school. Maybe one day we will build another castle.’
‘You’ll build many things,’ Nick told him. ‘More than I ever will.’
JoJo nodded. His eyes were still bright, but grief rolled over them like passing clouds.
Nick closed his hand over the beads, absorbing their vanishing warmth. JoJo blinked, gathered water spilling from the corners of his eyes. To Nick’s amazement, the boy smiled then – as if a quiet trickle of feeling had woken within, flowing from a source long denied.
‘Mama gave it to me when we were in the box.’ It was quietly spoken, as if in a cathedral of memory where only they sat. ‘She said to wear it until she came back.’ His mouth was trembling; his fists came up to rub away tears – then, slowly, returned to his sides.
‘She did not come back,’ he went on, raising his face to Nick’s. Now the restraint of manhood was in every feature; Nick saw him breathing sorrow inwards, turning it to strength. ‘But you did. You came. So you can take her with you.’ He nodded at Nick’s closed hand. ‘Like you wanted to.’
Nagode was stirring behind them, arms reaching out to her brother. ‘JoJo!’ she called. He responded instinctively, turning towards the cry as a father would. Then he paused, his body halfway across the space between them. ‘Goodbye, Nicholas.’ The boy’s face was hidden, but Nick heard something strong and new in his voice – the force of decision. ‘I’ll see you again.’
Then he was running back to his sister, lifting her out of the policewoman’s arms, hugging her as she began to laugh.
I’ll see you again. As Nick turned towards the waiting aeroplane JoJo’s words rolled ahead of him, leading to unknown places. He followed them, Bako’s beads rubbing against each other in his hand, the cord stretching and yet refusing to break.
The line of migrating birds raced him as the aeroplane breached the pull of gravity. Their wings dipped as he rose to meet them, perfect in their symmetry. And at the moment their pathways crossed, he saw each separate form blur and merge in their onward flight, transforming into a single wave of life.
‘Here? This is the one, Uncle Nicholas?’
The young girl’s feet are bare. She’s standing in the long grass by a kissing gate, pointing to a red climbing rose. Her legs are already soaking wet with dew.
‘Shouldn’t she should put some shoes on, darling?’ the old woman asks Nick. ‘They just came off the plane yesterday – she’ll catch her death.’ He answers: ‘Mum, you worry too much.’
It’s an early-summer morning – warm, but full of moisture. The old woman has been telling her guests to wrap up ever since they woke. ‘But youth never listens,’ she whispers to Nick. ‘At thirteen I knew everything, too.’
Now she calls across the garden. ‘You’ll catch cold, dear. You’re not used to English weather yet.’
But the girl only laughs. ‘Don’t worry, Grandmother. I’m strong.’
‘Are you OK, Mum?’ Nick holds the old woman’s arm.
‘I’m fine, silly,’ she tells him. ‘I look better than you.’ It’s true. Lines are growing into his hair and across his face like grey wire. ‘Like someone started to draw over you,’ she’d told him once.
‘I wish they could,’ he’d replied. ‘Draw a better version.’
She’s touched that he still worries about her. He checks her pills every morning, in case she forgets to take them. ‘They’re important,’ he reminds her. ‘They brought you back to us.’
‘You brought me back,’ she tells him on his blackest days. ‘As soon as the judge let you out, you came and took me away from that dreadful place. Whatever else you did – remember, you did that for me.’
These days she has to lean on him to walk. And she gets cold so quickly. But it’s not the terrible, long, white cold of the ward; now her world has colours in it. Sometimes she imagines how they would look on a canvas. Sapphires and silvers. A vast blue filled with light – like a sky, coming nearer to her every day.
Today the same blue is opening above them all in the garden. The girl’s brother is dark against it, tall as a hazel tree. He doesn’t speak much – but when he does, it’s slow and rich. Over last night’s tea he showed them sketches from his portfolio, building designs he made during his architectural apprenticeship. ‘They’re like paintings,’ the old woman told him. ‘They have souls.’ And he’d laughed – but she heard something else under the sound, angry and red, like a wound.
The two of them arrived from the airport after a day of anxious waiting: the girl so happy – bright as a flower, touching everything in the kitchen and telling jokes. But the brother sat slowly down at the table, Nick silent as a shadow opposite, meaningless sentences passing between them. Sometimes the brother tried to smile at her – and the old woman was reminded of that other boy who used to sit on the very same seat in her kitchen all those years ago. His smile had been sad, too – a smudged charcoal line. Nothing in life is ever really over and done, she’d told Nick that ten years ago when he first brought her back home, when loss still burned in him like an unquenchable, devouring flame. She’d said: ‘Even if you paint over something it doesn’t mean it’s gone. It’s still there, part of the picture. All our living is really re-living.’
This girl is living for the first time. They can all see it in her – that flowering of life. She stands at the kissing gate in the sunshine, touching the climbing rose Nick planted the day he brought his mother back home. An unlikely rose, planted in the frosts of a brutal winter – that grew into glorious colour.
Petals fall around her as the girl pulls off one of the roseblooms. ‘I love the red,’ she says. ‘It reminds me of her.’
‘You don’t even remember her,’ the brother tells her. The old woman hears colours in his voice – rain colours, deep purples and blues.
The girl shakes her head. ‘I do,’ she says. ‘In my way.’
Now Nick is at his mother’s side, pushing up her sleeve very gently. A bracelet shines on her wrist, its beads red and bright.
‘I’m going to miss it,’ she
tells him, wistful.
He touches her cheek. ‘But you’re so much better now, Mum,’ he says. ‘You don’t need it any more.’
‘And you’ll have me.’ The girl takes her other hand. She’s going to be as tall as her brother – long bones, like the brushes artists use for the finest strokes.
‘For now,’ the brother says.
At last the bracelet comes undone. Nick turns to his friend, holding it in his hand. ‘I would pay any price to change what happened. You know that. Anything at all.’
‘I want nothing from you,’ the tall man answers, his head lifting, like a challenge. ‘We have our own lives now. I’ll be a junior partner soon. I’m building a house for Adeya. Once she finishes her training, we’ll marry. Nagode can live with us, when she gets tired of the weather here.’ Then he laughs. ‘The English love to offer to pay for things that can’t be bought.’
But he did pay, the old woman wants to tell him. He paid when they locked him up, when he sold his house in London and sent all the money away, when his girlfriend tried for a while but couldn’t stick with him. His winter came too early, you see, and she wanted her time in summer. Look at him now, she wants to say. He’s still paying, every day.
‘I did not approve of this plan at first,’ the man is saying. ‘There are plenty of good private schools back home. But Nagode insisted.’
‘It’s my adventure.’ She smiles at him, and he softens.
‘Your adventure.’ He takes her hand. ‘Mama would be happy. The world is yours to conquer.’
The girl takes the bracelet from Nick, and brings it to her lips. ‘Tie it on for me,’ she asks.
His fingers shake as he makes the knot, but she’s patient. The petals smell sweet falling from her hands; the bruised ones smell sweetest.