I’d rushed to boast about it to Zannah, that I’d seen a bird, that Dad had pointed it out to me, a bird catching a fish. I tried to describe it, couldn’t find the words, my arms windmilling in frustration, Zannah disbelieving. Finally, I appealed to my father. But he was gone, the door to the study shutting behind him with a click.
The English kingfisher I was watching was bigger and less magical than my remembered bird. But it too could hover for a moment of suspended time as it chose its point to strike. It seemed to barely disturb the water and then it was back on its branch, a fish held firmly in its dagger beak. I saw now, as I had been too mesmerized to see then, the tearing cruelty in the way it mastered its struggling prey, surrounded by the flashing drops of water. Fish and bird both glittered for a second against the drab of the bank and then were gone.
On my way back to the car I passed the couple again, gave them the thumbs up.
‘See it, did you?’ They both smiled, the same smile, grown alike together. I smiled back, feeling very much alone, walked back to the car in the eye-watering wind.
As I turned the corner, the loneliness dissolved into irritation. There David was again, in the car park, leaning against my car. This time he seemed lost in a reverie, gazing into space. I was surprised he could be so still. His hands hung down by his sides as though in readiness for something. Without the vacant grin his face was drawn and wary. Only when he turned and saw me did the animation return.
‘We meet again.’
I hadn’t the energy to humour him this time, to do anything but stand and wait for him to move so I could get away.
‘Leaving already?’ he asked.
‘When you stop using my car as a resting place, yes.’
He sprang aside, motioned me in, bowed clownishly as I started to drive away. I dismissed the whole encounter from my mind, thinking of the road ahead, the long drive back to town. But I couldn’t quite shake off the lingering image that I had of the capering figure with the grinning face, watching me as I drove away.
RING-NECKED PARAKEETS
Psittacula krameri, family ‘Psittacidae’
I had meant to go back home the next day but Zannah, little sister from hell, trapped me, pleading that we never spent enough time together. Naturally, once I had agreed, taken the extra day off work and stayed, she then started moping round the flat not sure what to do with me. The two of us were stuck, alone together. We had exhausted all topics of conversation. It was drizzling again. We were reverting to our childhood selves, prickly, restless.
‘Why don’t we go to Kew?’ I suggested, flicking through an old copy of Time Out. I had already spent an hour pacing the limits of the flat: kitchen, sitting room, spare bedroom, back to the kitchen, where Zannah sat, still in her dressing gown, nursing a cooling tea, watching me as I went.
‘So expensive,’ she sighed.
‘It’s free entry if you take in your Christmas tree to recycle it.’
‘Manda! You’re supposed to be the observant one.’ I went back to the sitting room and took a closer look. It was a plastic tree, and oddly familiar with its gappy branches. The decorations looked familiar too.
‘Is that our old tree?’ The moment I looked at it properly I could see that it was, and suddenly I was nine again, piecing it together with my father, transforming the prickly bundles of plastic. I let my fingers trail across the branches, setting the tinsel into uneasy shimmering motion. ‘You hated that tree.’
‘I know.’ She joined me now in the sitting room, and grimaced at it ruefully. Every Christmas she had whined about having a plastic tree, wanting the sort of Christmas we read about in books: snow, and robins, and chestnuts. It was our mother’s fault; she’d filled Zannah’s head with stories of her childhood holidays. But even our mother had enough sense not to go out looking for a fir tree in Tanzania and we’d made do with this one. Every December in the sticky heat we would deck it with sledges and snow flakes and apple-cheeked carol singers, and frost it with tinsel. We pulled the heavy curtains against the tropical sun for the moment when we would turn the fairy lights on and watch the tinsel shimmer. Except that the lights, damp-infested and rat-gnawed, would rarely work. That was always the favourite part of Christmas for me, the afternoons Dad and I spent patiently testing each bulb one by one, Dad re-twisting the wires and taping them into place, while I held the tape, the pliers, the spare bulbs, handing them to him as needed. By the time we got the lights working, Zannah and my mother would have drifted off and Dad and I would stand and admire them together. But then he’d retreat back into his study and I’d be left alone to run out into the sunshine where Mattie was waiting, hoping I’d throw him some sticks, his ragged flag of a tail waving in surrender.
Zannah’s voice recalled me to the present. ‘Juma shipped it over with the rest of Dad’s stuff. What Mrs Iqbal didn’t nab. I thought I’d put it up for old times’ sake.’
‘What did she get?’
‘The grandfather clock and the zebra-skin rug. And God knows what else, before he died.’
Given what I’d heard of Dad’s condition in the last few years of his life I felt Mrs Iqbal had earned her souvenirs, but I was a little sorry about the rug; I had fond memories of it. It used to lie on the cool hall floor in the shadowed centre of the house and I would spend hours sprawled on it, leafing through the Field Guide to East African Mammals, its pages worn soft with years of use, telling Mattie stories about how we’d fly on the magic zebra rug over the plains and up and up to Ngoro-Ngoro, where all the animals could talk. Mattie would lie with his eyes shut and his tail hopefully thumping at the rise and fall of my voice, until Juma came and found us and shooed us out. But Mattie was dead now, and Juma ill, old before his time, and the rug would be a sorry threadbare thing, a relic of another age.
‘Christmas is over. You should take it down.’
‘Not till the sixth.’ I’d forgotten Zannah’s obsession with correct procedure over all things Christmas, indeed all things traditional. I turned my back on the tree and went to stand at the window and watch the wind buffet the ragged clouds over the tops of the nearby buildings. Somewhere a siren tore the air and then faded into silence. A pigeon, its wings held up in a sharp vee, fought to hold its course against a sudden buffet of air. I felt the old restless longing to be somewhere out there with wide-open skies, not festering indoors watching the weather close us in.
In the end we settled on a walk in Richmond Park. Zannah agreed I could take my binoculars as long as I didn’t spend four hours staring into a bush at little boring brown birds, and I agreed as long as she agreed to shut up if I did see something interesting. The day had settled down into a grey flat dampness, not quite raining, but always ready to. Someone, somewhere, was burning leaves, and the unseasonable autumnal smell hung in the air. We stumped along with our hands in our pockets, neither of us being much able to handle the cold, and after a while the walk took on a rhythm of its own and the mutual silence became a restful one. She stopped, uncomplaining, as I checked out a green woodpecker’s bounding flight, or searched for a jay I could hear squabbling in the branches of a tree. She even pointed out the still, hunched figure of a heron and as it took off on massive wings and beat away towards the river she watched in silence, a faint smile on her face.
We walked on towards a clump of trees and I saw what I had come looking for. Four or five bright green birds swooping above us, soon joined by two or three more, their long thin silhouettes unmistakable even without the colour, or the screeching calls.
‘What are they?’
I handed her the binoculars. ‘Ring-necked parakeets.’
‘My God, what are they doing here?’ I thought she’d hand the binoculars back but she hung on to them, watching, as more birds joined them in the tree.
‘No one really knows. There were probably some escaped birds, originally, but they’re now established as breeding.’ This lot certainly looked to be checking out nesting holes. She handed back the glasses but kept her face ti
pped upwards, her eyes on the birds. I could see some of the strain of the last few days’ festivities ease out of her.
‘Fantastic,’ she said.
‘Yeah, I like them.’ It was true, even though I shouldn’t, even though they’re non-native birds, probably a crop pest, or they would be if they weren’t in London; possibly driving out native species from prime nesting sites because they nest earlier, nabbing the best spots. But the sheer joy of seeing their bright green tropical colours against the flat grey of an English sky outweighs all that. One bird hung acrobatically upside-down, balancing with its long slender tail. I felt myself smiling.
‘Remind you of home?’ Zannah asked. When was it, I wondered, that home, to Zannah, had become Africa? Home, in our family, had always been the England Zannah and I had never seen.
‘Hardly. they’re from India.’
‘You know what I mean. They must be freezing here.’
I refrained from pointing out that they probably hatched right here in Richmond. They certainly didn’t seem to be feeling the cold as they scrambled around the branches. Not the way I was, and the way Zannah looked to be as she huddled deeper into her jacket. The afternoon light was already thickening into dusk, and it was barely tea time. We watched the birds a little longer, then admitted defeat and retreated from the cold into the warmth of a cafe.
Once we were seated, Zannah pulled out a photograph from her bag.
‘I forgot, I was going to show you this. Juma sent it, with the last of Dad’s papers. Remember? The day the uniforms came.’
The photo had the washed-out candy colours of all our childhood pictures, faded over almost twenty years. Two little girls, Zannah and I, standing stiffly under a thorn tree in full school uniform. We are squinting into the sun, but my father, standing beside us, is grinning under the shade of his floppy hat, his face in partial shadow. I could remember putting on our uniform the day it all arrived, though not having the picture taken. I could remember how I couldn’t believe that one person would be expected to wear so many clothes all at once. I thought I would be driven through the floor by the weight, and I sweltered under the itchy and unfamiliar wool. In the picture Zannah is smiling but I have a strange, wary look, standing up straight, ready for some unspecified threat.
‘I don’t know what they were thinking, sending us off at that age.’ I slid the picture back towards Zannah, wishing she hadn’t shown it to me. The two little blonde girls stared up at me from the table, unaware of their fate. I wanted to put my coffee cup down on them, hide them, blot them out of existence, as though that could save them from their future.
The clothes had come with the six-monthly shipments from England. A shipment day was a red-letter day for us, one that meant strawberry jam, and cornflakes, and dark treacly sugar that stained the powdered milk in the cereal bowl brown. A shipment meant my mother smoothing out the damp newspapers the jars had been packed in as she read the fragments of stories from home. It meant my father hefting the weight of books with dry titles about husbandry and engineering, and disappearing with them into his study before taking them into the college. It meant a sudden rush of plenty, and then the slow dwindling back to normality and tinned plum jam on toast for breakfast.
But the strange scratchy clothes didn’t disappear with the strawberry jam and the cornflakes; they hung on in the wardrobe in my parents’ room all summer long, shrouded in plastic to protect them from the damp and the insects. Zannah would go and push her face into the wool and smell them, would open up the boxes with their stiff black shoes and smell them too, and I’d hear her talking to herself, telling herself stories. She loved to listen to my mother’s tales of her school days, loved to read the Mallory Towers books, talked endlessly of going back to England, our mythical home, the land of plenty.
I leaned down to look again at the little Manda. It seems such a trivial thing, a name. Amanda and Susannah, we’d been christened originally, but soon shortened by a series of African nannies who didn’t know that in England there were rules about everything, but above all, it seemed, about how you shortened your name. There was so much about us that would have marked us out as strange to the other girls at school but it was the names they latched on to in those first few weeks when we arrived. My familiar name followed me everywhere, transformed into a dead weight of difference, an instrument of torture. I’d hear it ringing sarcastically across the tarmac of the school playground, hissed contemptuously in the dark of the dormitory, and I’d brace myself for the next round of misery.
Peering closer I could see that my pictured hand is on Zannah’s shoulder, a curious gesture at once protective and repelling. One thing I did recall about that day was how young she looked, drowning in wool, the sleeves of her blazer covering her hands. Now, of course, we both look young, absurdly so, in the uniform which was old-fashioned even then. Even my father, who stands somehow detached from us with his hands in his pockets, looks like a young man, carefree.
‘Look after her, Manda,’ he had urged me as he left us at the airport. ‘I’m counting on you.’ The trusting way she put her hand in mine left me feeling at once exasperated and protective and I dropped it as soon as my father was gone, pushing her away. I didn’t want the responsibility. I didn’t want to think we had no one else but ourselves, lost in the echoing noise of the school. Having Zannah to look after only made me feel more alone. And besides, she seemed to thrive there, after the first few weeks had passed, found herself friends, found a niche for herself. It was I who needed looking after. I never understood why these girls were so hostile, what it was about me that repelled them. They turned on me the way a flock can turn on its weakest member, driving me out of their circle. I soon stopped looking for any friendship among them and withdrew to a world of my own. I saw Zannah settling down with her friends, their heads close together, sharing some confidence, and I kept away. My presence could only make things worse.
‘Who took the photo, do you think?’ I asked, turning it over to look at its blankly uninformative back.
Zannah shrugged. ‘Mum?’
‘Hardly.’
I’d known, even then, that we weren’t going to school in England just to get a decent education, not at ten and eight. The school had had to be begged to take us from so far away so young. I had hovered at the study door and heard my father persuading them down the echoing line, sweating at the cost of the call, enunciating each word as clearly as he could. I’d been drawn to the sound of his voice, wondering why he was shouting when my mother was having one of her lie-downs. Even after he had stood up, still talking, to push the door closed against me, I could still hear the words. Breakdown. Can’t cope. Desperate. They entered my games half understood and wove themselves into my dreams.
Once I’d caught Juma topping up the gin bottle with the filtered water from the fridge as I stood silently in the kitchen doorway. I knew what to think about that. All the servants steal, the expatriate wives said, as they took tea with my mother and competed as to who employed the most ingenious thief in their house. My mother sat and gazed vacantly into space, clattering her teacup into its saucer, ignoring them; it was I who listened to their tales as I handed round the biscuits in silence, following Juma with the teapot. He always moved unflinchingly about the room while the wives were recounting their tales of lying and cheating and theft, his face blankly indifferent as though he spoke no English.
Juma turned and saw I had caught him at it; red-handed, the wives would say, but he didn’t seem to mind. I could see the pale undersides of his fingers refracted through the green glass of the bottle, floating like fish.
‘For Madam,’ was all he said, and I nodded as though I understood. I never told on him, not to my mother. I didn’t want him to become an anecdote. And it was she who drank the gin, anyway. I’d seen her, in the kitchen, while the wives sat impatiently on the veranda, pursing their mouths and thinking up new stories. It was my father who checked the levels in the bottles in the drinks cabinet, against the marks he
’d made on the labels. I didn’t tell him, either. Little girls shouldn’t tell tales. I’d learned that much the hard way.
Instead I took to spending more and more time in the kitchen, badgering Juma for stories, the ones I liked, the ones he told about the animals. He would sigh and sit down with some suitable task, like polishing the silver or gutting a fish, and would work and talk while I listened, entranced. He seemed to have an endless fund of them. I watched his hands moving uninterruptedly about their work even as his voice halted and reached for the right English word to describe the pride of the tortoise, or the slowness of the elephant, or the fierceness of the lion. His children were far away, his wife was living at his village miles upcountry, and maybe he saw their round attentive faces in my own. Or maybe he just humoured the spoilt child of his employers, filling her imagination with stories. My father said we were bored, isolated, needed friends our own age, but this was what I lived for – the long slow afternoons with Mattie, or Juma, lazy in the heat, or loose in the scrubby wilderness of the garden. Being sent away to school felt like a banishment, exile for a crime I hadn’t even realized I was committing.
I looked out of the cafe window. The light outside had almost gone and the warmly lit interior competed with the dim outlines of the trees against the sky. Zannah’s reflected face, pale and distorted, appeared in the window, floating in mid air. I could still hear, faintly, the screeching of the parakeets, competing with the splattering of a renewed rain against the windows. She was lining up the knives and forks in front of her, squaring them up against the table edge in a neat row. Zannah always liked to have things straight.
Out of a Clear Sky Page 3