It was the detail of the make-up that did it for me. I had always liked to watch the careful ritual of her morning make-up, its transformative power over her mood. Makeup meant a good day; one when if she cried she did it carefully, head tipped back to keep her mascara from running, dabbing at the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief. She must have sat down that morning believing it would work, that she could keep control. I saw for a second the woman who had sat beside me at her dressing table and painted herself into perfection, smiling at me in the mirror, blowing me a scarlet kiss. I weakened. Instead of telling her to get up and climb up the steps I seated myself alongside her on the bench and allowed her to clutch at my hand, which she stroked as she talked.
She was drunk and she was rambling, but she made herself clear enough. I thought I’d heard it all, her misery, I thought I’d learned to tune it out, but this was different. She sat there and held and stroked my hand in a gentle parody of affection and told me she’d never loved me. Told me he’d never loved me either, had resented me from the moment he’d found out I was not a boy, this baby that had trapped him into a loveless marriage. Told me how she saw him watching, waiting, wishing she were dead so that he could return to Africa and forget we ever existed, any of us.
‘You’ll not see him for dust,’ she said. ‘The minute I’m gone.’ And I remembered the blank days of waiting in Tanzania, waiting for him to return. ‘He’ll go back to live with that whore of his,’ she said. And then he will be happy.’ And I saw him in my mind’s eye, grey against the grey sky, longing for freedom, choking on his guilt, and knew she was right.
The promenade at Peacehaven is long but it is not long enough. You can walk for miles alongside the sucking, restless sea and never walk the poison out of your head. My mother’s voice was always soft and hesitant, and to hear her, against the sea, you have to lean forward close to those painted lips. You have to strain to hear her even in that dead muffled air, because her words drop quietly against the stones. You have to gather each slurred syllable and pick it apart, catching at the sense. You have to listen hard to make it out. And then, eventually, you have to walk away. Because listening will drive you mad.
In that strange atmosphere that day it seemed I walked on for miles alone below the cliffs, the fog receding on before me, closing up behind me. I know I had an aching weariness in my legs as I finally returned. I stood at the base of the cliff stairs and felt a terrible sense of something wrong, and then I was running up them, my heart pounding as though it might pound out of my chest altogether. I remember looking up to see the mist thinning and the faint blue of the sky like a promise above me. And I remember no sound, no sound at all, as though I had been struck deaf. I climbed up the stairs, faster and faster, endlessly upwards, and saw the sky darken briefly above me, and then clear and the spring sun finally break through.
And as she fell, I thought maybe her words could fall with her, tumbling through the air, dropping away from me as I climbed and I wouldn’t have to hear them echoing through my head. That it was my fault, all my fault, everything was. That I should never have been born.
When Dad returned with Zannah and the car he found the excited little cluster of people at the top of the cliff and something terrible below, broken on the hard surface of the promenade. When the police led him gently away to the car he looked wildly round for me and found me at the top of the steps, still gasping at the effort of the climb. Fixing me with a sudden glare he pointed his finger and cried out that it was me.
I shook off the memory, trying to focus, trying to get myself back to the present. I had walked out of the health centre, and out of my job, on Wednesday. Only yesterday. I had gone back to the house and took my seat once more at the kitchen window, watching the birds. Chaffinches and goldfinches and greenfinches. Blackbirds and robins. Sparrows and dunnocks. You knew where you were with birds. You knew what they were. As they flew in, I checked the time, made a note, counted the numbers, watched them go about their lives and felt a measure of calm restored to me. This was what I needed, not drugs. The birds worked out their pecking orders at the feeders. Great tits before blue tits, blue tits before coal tits. Everything giving way to the bullying aggression of the wood pigeons, landing on perches meant for birds a tenth their size. The blackbird seeing off his rival, over and over, playing out the dominance game. I watched it until the light faded and the show was over and then I went back to the sofa and slept once more, the television soothing me to sleep.
The television. That made me stop and think. The television had been off when I woke up, that much I remembered, because I had had to switch it on. I went back into the sitting room and switched it off now, cocking my head to listen. There was a sound in the house, a familiar sound, something I hadn’t noticed before because it was so familiar. The computer’s almost silent hum. Upstairs in the spare bedroom the screen was lit up, the screensaver on, just the default setting, the Windows logo bouncing endlessly around its notional space. A shake of the mouse woke it up. The operating system was restored, everything back in place, my backup CDs scattered around my desk. And a note, on the screen, in a window of its own.
‘Good morning, Manda. You look so sweet asleep, I couldn’t bear to wake you. Goodbye, and thanks for everything. X’
As soon as I went to print it, it disappeared with a pop and an electronic blast of laughter that faded into silence. Shaking, I backed away from the machine, unwilling to touch it further. I fled downstairs for the kettle, seeking comfort in the rhythms of the morning, needing to settle my pounding heart. Outside the garden seemed different but it took a moment to place what was wrong. The bird feeders were gone, and it was deserted; every bird had flown.
CUCKOO
Cuculus canorus, family ‘Cuculidae’
I roamed the house for the rest of the morning, restless yet trapped, unable to face going out, not sure of what to do next. There seemed to be nothing else to do but wait for something to happen, someone to come. I jumped at every sound and each time the phone rang I froze, waiting for the answering machine to kick in, waiting to hear who it was. Don rang first, asking how I was. Then Zannah. Then Tom, apologizing for leaving so abruptly after dropping me off, asking me hesitantly if Id call him. During each call I stopped and waited as I listened, straining after every word, then went back to my pacing. Zannah tried again. I stood in the doorway of the spare room, listening to her voice without really hearing it, watching the endless cycling movement of the screensaver on the restored computer, wondering what lurked beneath. I knew I should go and look at it, should try and find out what had been done to it, but the thought of touching it filled me with dread. In the end, I just pulled out the computer’s plug at the wall and silenced it with a tiny pop.
The phone rang again. My own voice mocked me with its cheeriness. I snatched up the phone to silence it. Zannah again. As soon as she heard me answer it she launched into a tirade.
‘Where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling here, calling your work, calling your mobile. You don’t even answer your email.’
‘I’ve been here. Home.’ I had to clear my throat to speak. It had been a while, I realized, since I had talked to anyone. All the unsaid words buzzed in my head. I shook it to clear it, trying to concentrate on what Zannah was saying to me.
‘. . . and even your work don’t seem to know what’s going on,’ she concluded. There had been more but I must have tuned it out for I had formed no memory of it. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Well. . .’ Was there something wrong? Other people seemed to think so. Zannah’s voice was going off again, rising and falling, then pausing, waiting for an answer. ‘Look, it’s not what you think, it’s not me, I’m fine. It’s
I started to tell her. I tried to lay it out, what had been happening. It was hard to get it straight, into a coherent order, keeping all the threads of the story separate and clear. I’d thought too much about it, these last few days, confined to the house alone, waiting for
David to return. There was too much to say. And as I spoke I could hear the words I was saying as though they were coming from somebody else and I faltered into silence. It sounded thin and unconvincing, improbable even to me. Bird feeders that appeared and disappeared. A computer that got hacked into and then restored. A student who wasn’t a student. A bird that might have been killed by a person or by a cat. Even as I tried to marshal the facts into order they shifted and rearranged themselves, became inherently implausible, evaporated into smoke.
‘He was spying on you through your computer?’ Zannah asked sharply. ‘Look, Manda, I think I should come round. Don’t go anywhere.’
‘No, don’t,’ I said, but it was too late. I was left with the dial tone and then silence. She had rung off.
Resuming my pacing helped clear my brain a little. I couldn’t let Zannah find me here, not now, not yet, not until I had more concrete evidence, something that would show her I wasn’t imagining things, wasn’t losing my grip on reality. I knew how she’d take charge, sweeping all before her. I knew I was in no state to resist her. I set aside the heavy chair that had been barricading the front door and stepped out cautiously, looking up and down the street. No sign of Zannah yet, of course. Then I went back in and out through the back door, making sure I’d locked it firmly behind me. I couldn’t think in the house, not properly. I needed some way to clear my head, to get it all straight, and then I would be able to persuade her.
I was halfway to the gravel pit before I noticed the change in the weather. It had been warm when I stepped outside at first, unseasonably so for spring, almost oppressive. But I could see now that it was gathering for a storm. Behind the rooftops the sky was purpled dark with cloud but the roofs themselves were gilded by the fragile slanting light of the sun. The wind was picking up, swirling a few loose scraps of litter around the streets. I turned down the track that led to the gravel pit and picked up my pace, reaching for the shelter of the trees. The afternoon light had gone now, replaced by the onrushing sweep of cloud.
The first drops of rain fell fat and hard about me as I sprinted for the hedge-line, head down against the wind. The sky had turned black and it was dark as dusk. I crouched down to wait it out, as I remembered doing as a child caught out in an African storm. I pulled up my collar and turned my back to the wind, curling in on myself, bowing my head to the fury, hugging my knees to my chest, making myself as small a target as possible. The sharp smell of rain on dry earth caught at the back of my throat and overwhelmed me with the memories it summoned up. Then the rain swept in with tropical intensity, followed by a battering onslaught of hail, ripping through the leaves of the trees around me. Branches danced and beat the air in fury, debris whipped past, and I found myself hurtled back by the whirled frenzy of the storm, back into the past. I perceived only dimly the thrashing hedgerow around me, the white froth of flowers and the muted greens of an English spring. Instead, I was back in Dar, watching the rivulets of red mud that ran through the streets and everywhere, the bursting intensity of new life after the dry. And I was thrown back to the edge of the open pit of my father’s grave, for we buried him in the middle of just such a storm.
It was so real that it felt like more than a memory. I was there, really there, still sleepless and crumpled from the hastily arranged flight, still jet-lagged and sleep-deprived. Zannah was there with me too, clutching my hand, and Mrs Iqbal aloof in her grief, solid in her sari, the three of us soaked through to the skin but unwilling to come in from the rain, watching the spades of the gravediggers as they battled to fill the grave against the storm. Zannah had grabbed me as the coffin was lowered. ‘You’re not walking away from this one,’ she hissed, but there was no need, for whatever it was I had walked away from then was being buried in the red earth. My father was at rest at last, at home at last, where he belonged. The service had been drowned out by the drum of rain on the tin-roofed church. Only the singing could cut through, a great choir of voices, raising a banner of harmony against the thundering rush of the rain. Who were they mourning, these people, I wondered, who was this man they had thronged to bury? As we left the funeral hand after hand reached out to us, face after face greeted us, claimed us. Bwana Brooks’s daughters.
Zannah had arranged, somehow, for a goat to be roasted in the garden for all the mourners and the rain lifted and the steaming heat of the day resumed. Mrs Iqbal sat in the sitting room of the house and fanned herself with the order of service, lifting her still-heavy, still-black plait off her neck to catch the breeze in a gesture so reminiscent of my mother that I had to turn away. I couldn’t face the crowds outside so I drifted upstairs and wandered through the empty rooms. I tried to phone home once more to tell Gareth what had happened but there was no answer but my own voice on the machine. I felt his absence as an ache. He had been too busy to come, and that in itself said everything. Too busy and too distant these days, wrapped up in his work, his own world. I left a brief message down the crackling monsoon lines and stared out of the window at Zannah laughing in the garden with a trail of children behind her, all dressed up in their Sunday best.
On my last evening I sat out on the veranda, watching as the rain came and went. Zannah was busy indoors, making arrangements, contacting old friends. Her voice changed as she talked on the phone, regaining the accent of her childhood. The night shrieked with life around me, the air damp and still and warm. I was getting bitten to death by mosquitoes but I couldn’t bear to move, to disturb the weight of memories that had settled around me. This is the last time I’ll sit here, I thought to myself. The last time I’ll hear these noises, smell the rich smell of the African monsoon. The thought summoned no answering pang. Among the half-remembered night noises I could make out the call of the coucal, mourning for its family. I have no mother, I have no father, I’m all on my own, own, own. You and me both, buddy, I thought.
I wasn’t even sure if Gareth would meet me at the airport on my return, but he was there and he greeted me with a fierce tenderness, hugging me so hard I was crushed against his chest. He held my face in his hands and stared at me until I looked away.
‘I’ve missed you,’ was all he said.
‘Me too,’ I said, but I was tired and feeling grubby and soiled from the flight, itchy with insect bites, wanting only to get home and bathe and sleep. When I finally sat down on our bed and let the tiredness and the strange loneliness of the past few days overwhelm me, Gareth came and held me while I cried. I felt battered from a fortnight of demands in Africa – the clutching outstretched hands of the children in the marketplace, the curious stares and avid sympathy and Zannah, always Zannah, trying to tug some response from me, some acknowledgement of grief. Gareth’s solid arms around me felt like just another demand, something I couldn’t fulfil. He was too close, too insistent, kissing my neck, a lover not a comforter, asking, needing. I withdrew and curled up in my own arms, realizing as I turned away what a habitual gesture that had become. He quietly stood up and walked out of the room, shutting the door behind him. I woke to an empty house and stood at the window watching the grey street and longed to take that moment back, but it was too late, too late for us now. You can never go back.
It only lasted that brief moment, while the storm passed over and roared itself out through the trees. Then the illusion was gone and I was back to myself again, back in the familiar surroundings of the gravel pit, beginning to shiver a little as the wind blew through my wet clothes. But the memory had unsettled me, left me shaken by the intensity of the emotion, rocked by it. I crouched for a moment more, eyes tight closed, as though that might bring it back to me. And then as I straightened up and pulled back further under the tree to shelter from the slackening remnants of the rain, I saw Gareth standing there by the water, only a few yards away, as though I had conjured him up.
I stood for a moment, just watching him, waiting for him to vanish, to morph back into someone else, a stranger, but he didn’t. His back was turned, but it was Gareth’s back, indisputably. Yet still I d
idn’t move to approach him. I didn’t like coincidences, not any more. I thought about turning back, using the shelter of the hedge-line to get away, but it was too late to escape. He was already turning, his shoulders hunched as he brought up the binoculars, and I saw them glint once in the renewed sun as he trained them right on me.
And then he was suddenly waving and approaching me, pulling off his jacket and throwing it over my shoulders so I was surrounded by his familiar smell and the warmth from his body, there too fast for me to react, to do anything but stand there, caught in the onslaught
‘You’re soaked,’ he said, without preamble, as though the past weeks – months, years – of estrangement had never happened. ‘Look at you. Look at the state of you.’
And the way he looked at me as he spoke reminded me of the intensity of his gaze when we had first met, the way his eyes had caught mine, they way they had rested on my face, unwilling to leave. His hand reached up and touched my cheek, just lightly, just a brush with fingers that burned against my chilled skin. ‘You’re frozen.’
‘Caught unawares,’ I said. His hands caught up mine and enclosed them, chafing them to get them warm. How many times had he done this? They seemed to fit exactly, familiar as an old glove, and when his arms pulled me into a hug and I buried my face in his shoulder, that fitted too, like coming home.
I pulled away sharply, breaking the spell, trying to recover my equilibrium. This was all wrong.
‘I thought I’d find you here,’ he said. ‘You’re a hard woman to reach these days.’
‘Look, if it’s about the house,’ I said, and the illusion of resumed intimacy between us suddenly evaporated. Of course, he was just worried about the house, getting rid of it, getting rid of me, getting on with his new life. His jacket felt awkward on me now, heavy and harsh against my wet skin, and I struggled out of it. The rain was passing anyway, the sun shining through the last remnants of the cloud, bringing up a smoke of vapour from the wet grass. Everything around us sparkled, drops of water shivering in the breeze.
Out of a Clear Sky Page 16