The Memory of Love (3 page)

To the right of the road lay an area of wetlands, a nature reserve. They are there still. Too wet for construction. Back then you had a view over the wetlands from the road, all the way to the sea. I turned to look.

‘I’m told there are some remarkable orchids growing there,’ I said.

‘You like flowers?’

‘I’m no expert,’ I answered. ‘I live in an apartment and the garden doesn’t belong to me. I enjoy them, though, who doesn’t?’

‘Swamp orchids.
Lissochilus
. That’s what you’re thinking of. They grow there. And you’re right, they are remarkable. They grow to the height of you and me.’

‘You’ve seen them?’

‘Not recently. But a few years ago, yes. A group of us from the horticultural society made a visit. Once you know where they grow it’s easy to find them again. Not so easy at first.’ She stopped talking as she sped up to overtake a taxi cruising for customers.

‘I must contact the horticultural society and see whether they have any more trips planned. Perhaps you can help me?’

Possibly she might offer to take me there. I felt her hesitation, considering whether such a thing would be appropriate.

Presently she said, ‘I’m trying to grow some orchids at home. Not the
Lissochilus
. I’m not sure that would be possible. I haven’t had much luck. But I do have some beautiful lilies, though – amaryllis – Harmattan lilies. They’re in flower during the windy season. Perhaps you could come with Julius one evening.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. Though her words hadn’t quite amounted to an invitation.

Minutes later we pulled up outside the faculty buildings. I stepped out of the car and leaned into the open window to thank her. She inclined her head and gave a slight smile of acknowledgement, which suddenly and without warning transformed into an expression of pure joy. In the instant of responding, I realised she was no longer looking at me. I straightened and turned. Julius.

In a way I’m lucky. For a long time I didn’t believe it. I yearned to be remarkable, when in fact I was anything but. I have one of those faces, a face that looks like any other. With age you might say I have acquired a little distinction. The hair. But most of my life I had the kind of face – frankly speaking – the kind of face people forgot.

When I shook Julius’s hand I could tell he was struggling to place me. Just as I once considered it my misfortune to be unworthy of being remembered, so it is the misfortune of more charismatic types to be rarely forgotten. With others around them to do the work they naturally become poor at retaining names and faces. It was evident that this situation was common to Julius and didn’t disturb him in the least. Saffia explained we had met in town. He patted me on the shoulder; his expression was one of agreeable interest. Not the jealous kind, or perhaps he simply felt unthreatened. When Saffia mentioned flowers, I saw my opportunity and took it. I stood and watched while Julius opened the back door of the car, dropped his briefcase on top of the newspapers and walked around to the driver’s seat, while Saffia shifted over on to the passenger side. He climbed in, released the lever and pushed the seat back.

They waved at me as they drove away. I stood there and my thoughts followed them. For a moment I felt strangely abandoned. But the feeling passed, because by then I was in possession of an invitation – to visit their house Monday coming. The address and the time were carefully noted in my book.

Saturday morning. I was sitting on the verandah after breakfast, looking through the newspapers and smoking a cigarette when Vanessa showed up. She wore a sullen expression, her lips pressed so tightly together that when she opened her mouth to speak I could see a line in her lipstick, like a tidemark. In the last few days I had completely omitted to call her. Clearly she had come to do battle.

Before she could get the words out I said, ‘Just the person I was thinking about.’ True, more or less. I’d woken filled with early-morning desire. Vaguely, before I got up to use the bathroom, I had wanted her there with me. Even now, despite her sour expression, I felt the returning urge.

She pushed her lips into a pout. She wore a narrow skirt and a tight-fitting
tamule
with puffed sleeves. Her hair had been straightened and tonged into outsize curls. It was not a style I particularly admired. Still, it spoke of the effort she had invested in her appearance that day. Certainly she wasn’t on her way to church.

‘Where have you been?’ She stood, hands on hips.

‘I’ve been here,’ I said. ‘Where else would I be? Coffee?’

In the kitchen I spooned some instant coffee into a cup, poured hot water on to it and filled the cup to the brim with Carnation Milk. Any less and she would act as if I was a miser. Vanessa was the kind of girl who deplored meanness, especially in a man. When I went back outside she had sat herself down at the table. I set the cup carefully on the table along with a box of sugar cubes.

‘Help yourself,’ I said. Sugar was still a small luxury to a woman like Vanessa.

After a moment’s pause she reached out and took two cubes from the carton, dropped one into the cup, placed the other on a teaspoon and began to lower it in and out of the hot liquid, watching the cube crumble and start to dissolve. Still ignoring me she raised the spoon to her lips.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Things have been so busy. The exams are coming up and I have to prepare my students. Late home every night. Up early. I didn’t want to trouble you.’

‘I could have come and cooked for you.’ She kept her eyes lowered.

‘It would be too much.’

‘I don’t mind.’ A pause; she pushed her lips into a more exaggerated pout, glancing at me upwards through her eyelashes. ‘I could have sent something for you.’

‘You’re too good to me.’ I stood up and went to stand behind her. I leaned over and pressed my lips into her neck. She made as if to squirm away. I bit the flesh lightly. She giggled and protested, but with no real conviction. I pulled her up, turned her to face me and kissed her. I tasted the sweetness of the sugar on her tongue, the wax of her lipstick.

We lay in bed together until mid-morning. Later I watched Vanessa as she moved around my apartment, tidying papers, clearing the table, putting my shoes away in the cupboard. In those moments I found myself already comparing her to Saffia. Vanessa was the younger and yet that did not make her any fresher or more innocent. Naive, yes. She tried for a greater sophistication than she possessed. I was happy enough to have her around, she barely had the power to irritate me. Each time the door closed behind her, the space was filled immediately, there was no vacuum where she’d been. My thoughts, in her absence, were not of her. Yet Saffia had already stepped into my dreams.

Vanessa wanted to be the wife of a university professor, the ambition she had set herself. And maybe one day she would be, though she gave herself too easily. I wished her well. I lay propped up against the pillows and watched her trying to create a place for herself in my life. It seemed a shame really, I told myself, but a time was coming when I would have to stop seeing her.

CHAPTER 2

The woman sat skewed in the chair opposite Adrian, knees together, arms pressed to her sides, shoulders forward, feet tucked in. A zigzag on the metal chair. The flesh was sparse on her bones. Around her waist she wore a cloth of yellow-and-black faded geometric shapes. Her breasts were covered by a loose blouse. Adrian could not guess her age. The people here seemed ageless to him. She called him ‘Doctor,’ proffered answers to his questions in a toneless voice, so low he strained to hear. Not once did she meet his eye, but studied her hands folded in her lap. She complained of headaches and asked for medicine for the pain, but the doctors had found nothing wrong with her. So they sent her to him.

Adrian talked about what he could do for her, searched for words he thought she might understand. On the paper in front of him was written her name. He spoke it out loud. For the first time she looked at him. She pointed at a bottle of vitamins on his desk and so he gave it to her. It was an easy thing to do.

That night Adrian Lockheart dreamed. One of the few times he had done so since arriving in the country. He was on the edge of a waterfall, leaning forward, hovering over the rush of water. Down below, he could see nothing beyond the torrent of water. In the dream he was a child again. He stretched out his arms and swallow-dived, waking just as he would have been engulfed by the falling water. The dream was not of death, because he woke softly laughing.

An echo of the feeling returns to him as he sits and gazes out of the window, his thoughts carried adrift on the tide of the voice of the old man lying in the bed. A child’s face appeared over the top of the wall, a child’s grinning face. The eyes met Adrian’s own. A moment later the face disappeared. Then came the sound of laughter and a memory of the dream rose up. The feeling of falling, a surge in his stomach, the glee that comes from an innocent physical pleasure. He turns to where the old man lies, his arms above the cotton sheet, pressed against the length of his body. The old man has stopped speaking and is watching him. His eyes, surrounded by curtains of ashy skin, are small, dark and liquid bright.

Adrian is silent a few seconds longer; he hopes his lapse will appear deliberate, a moment of contemplation.

‘Shall I come by tomorrow?’

The old man inclines his head and continues to watch him.

Adrian, who might be used to such things, feels discomfited. Reflexively he continues, ‘Is there anything you want? Books? Newspapers? I’ll arrange it for you.’

‘Thank you. I have everything.’ The voice is hoarse. The words accompanied by a slight smile, a tightening of the facial muscles, a stretching of the lips, the impression more of pain than pleasure.

‘Very well, then.’

Midday. Adrian rises, gathers his briefcase and jacket and steps into the shaded corridor, where the air is cooler by a degree or two. He leans against the wall. The building has no air conditioning except in the ICU ward, and even there it seems to battle unequally against the burning outside air, which seeps through every fissure in the brickwork. He breathes deeply, counts to three, and walks down the corridor into the daylight.

He crosses the quadrangle towards his office, sun beating squarely down upon the crown of his head. The quadrangle is no more than a patch of yellowed grass, divided into triangles by a pair of crossing paths. Each triangle is hemmed with concrete and contains a single concrete bench. Never has Adrian seen anybody sitting there. Whoever designed the place must have imagined the occupants of the building relaxing or eating their lunch here. But the sun makes it impossible.

Behind the door of his office he sets the briefcase squarely upon the desk, turns on the fan, removes his jacket and stands with his sweat-soaked back to the wind. He pours himself a glass of water from a plastic bottle, opens the briefcase and removes his fountain pen and papers.

When he was first shown to the room, his office, he recognised it for what it was, though neither he nor the woman hospital administrator made comment. Towering walls that reached up to a square of unpainted ceiling. A metal door fitted with a bolt and padlock. A solitary narrow window with six steel bars that reached across the outside sill. An oversized desk covered in scarred, orange-coloured varnish and faced by three chairs of different heights and ages. On a brittle wire a single forty-watt light bulb rotated and cast troubled shadows into the corners of the room. Adrian had knocked his head on it as he crossed the room and now was left with a burn, shiny and taut, on his forehead. Twice he has put through a request for the window to be enlarged.

In his converted box room he sits apart from the sounds outside: the creak of the gurney, the clatter of metal upon metal, names being called, footsteps: smart and fast; the shuffle and bump of a person on crutches.

The piece of paper in front of him he has already headed with his patient’s name. Next to the words
Reason for Referral
, Adrian has written
Self
. For several minutes he writes down everything he has been told in the last two hours, as he remembers it. He writes swiftly, unhesitatingly. The smooth nib of the pen moves across the paper inaudibly, tracing in black lines the story of the man in the private room.

A fly is trapped, one moment frenziedly hitting the window, the next hurtling across the room above Adrian’s head. He swats at it and misses. Now his concentration is broken and so he sets down his pen, crosses to the window and prises it open. Beyond the high walls he hears water running, the hollow knock of empty buckets, women’s voices arguing, he thinks. He is not sure. He thinks how quiet affluence is: people living in private spaces, arguments in the shape of silences and closed doors. Compares it to the rowdy unselfconsciousness of poverty. The swooping laughter of children, though, is the same anywhere in the world.

That morning, after he woke from the dream, he pushed the sheets back and lay staring at the blank ceiling and listening to the noises of the morning. Perhaps because of the dream, he thought of his father and his mother.

Of his father, sitting opposite him in the parlour. Outside the trees gradually turning black against a silver sky, each possessed of its own lucent aura. Adrian watching his father’s hands: the black hairs against the pale skin, the bony wrists, grey-veined, emerging from the cuff of his checked weekend shirt. His father’s fingers fumbling with pieces of an Airfix plane.

For years Adrian assumed the idea for the afternoon’s project must have belonged to one of his parents, most likely his mother. For Adrian had no interest in model aircraft, could never see the point in gluing together pieces of moulded plastic. But now when he turns the notion around, he considers the possibility the idea may have been his: the trip to the shop to choose the aircraft, the drive home clutching the paper-wrapped box, spreading the pieces out upon the polished rosewood table all hint at a child’s lack of imagination and eagerness to please. His mother seated at her desk answering correspondence, watching them both through averted eyes.

The model, though, is a Lancaster BIII. Adrian’s own choice would have been more predictable. A Spitfire, say. His father tells him these planes raided German dams two years before the end of the war. Adrian watches his father fumble, knowing he must not help. There are occasions when an intervention might be disguised as filial duty: clearing his father’s breakfast plates, fastening a tricky cufflink. But times when his father was bent over his shoelaces, Adrian saw no choice but to watch the knot slip over and over through his fingers. Sometimes Adrian’s mother went to help. Adrian noticed how, as soon as she was through, his father levered himself up from the chair in stiff silence and left the room.

And so he sits silently, watching his father’s hands. While his father in turn appears to have forgotten the presence of his son, fights to hold on to the pieces in fingers that tremble and flutter like a moth’s wings. Another memory superimposes itself on the first. Of walking through woods with his father searching for ley lines, or was it underground streams? Each holding on to a forked stick. His delight when the stick in his father’s hands began to tremble.

Since the first days of his arrival in the new country, without the order of his previous life, time had taken on a kind of shapelessness. In the early days he had risen, full of interest in his new surroundings. Every action, however small, held its own place in the day. Showering beneath the thin trickle of water that barely wet his shoulders. The sound of his own footsteps echoing in the corridors. The time he spent rearranging the shabby furnishings of his office. Each activity had its own purpose, pitch and resonance, like the notes from a tuning fork. But as the days passed the resonance had faded.

Breakfast in the canteen and he watched his colleagues come and go, each with a nod of the head. He knew their names, faces, their occupations. Some he had shared a beer with after work in a nearby bar, invariably marked by a late arrival or a drink left unfinished as someone hurried back to deal with another emergency. At mealtimes he sat over a cup of instant coffee, watching the tendrils of steam grow thin and fade, as around him others went about their business.

At other times he walked the long wards. Saw the occupants of a crowded minibus driven by a young man high on marijuana at the end of a sixteen-hour shift, encountered the unseeing gaze of a man beneath whom bamboo scaffolding had collapsed, watched listless mothers fanning inert babies.

Three weeks following his arrival, Adrian saw his first patients. This after he had obtained the consent of the hospital administrator for a system of referrals. The people his colleagues sent to him were outpatients mostly, the ones with whom the doctors could find nothing wrong. They sat with rounded shoulders and lowered eyes, hands curled in their laps like docile pets. What brings you here? The doctors sent me to you. Urged on by Adrian’s gentle encouragement they described headaches, pains in their arms, legs, abdomens. Here, here, here. Touching body parts. When did the pains begin? Sometime after the trouble. Yes, I was healthy before then.

At Adrian’s insistence they described in dampened voices what they had endured, as though the events described belonged to somebody else. Adrian had read the press accounts, the post-conflict reports. He knew how the war had begun – the barely remarked border crossing of a small contingent of foreign-trained rebel soldiers, who soon declared their presence by taking over a series of towns and vowed to march on the capital and overturn the bloated autocracy, which had ruled for twenty years. And he knew how it ended – how the civilians had borne the brunt of the rebels’ fury from the outset and endured their agonies for a decade until the war was brought to a halt by the army of a nearby state with an ambitious despot of its own.

Adrian’s empathy sounded slight, unconvincing in his own ears. So he nudged his patients along with questions, aware of the energy it cost him to obtain a sliver of trust. Later, in his apartment, he splashed water on his face. Once he filled the basin and plunged his face into the water, held his breath until his lungs ached. Alone he waited for his thoughts to be restored, for his jarred soul to settle.

And afterwards each of his new patients made the same request for medicines, to which Adrian explained he was not that sort of doctor. A nod, of acceptance rather than understanding. They thanked him and left. None of them ever returned.

Late afternoon on a Saturday Adrian was walking past a row of stalls on the streets behind the hospital. A woman called out to him – he turned, recognising her by the yellow-and-black print of her wrap. Automatically Adrian smiled and raised his hand to wave. The woman was walking towards him with an unsteady puppet gait. A damp stain ran down the front of her blouse, the top few buttons of which were undone, partially revealing an arc of dark nipple.

‘Doctor!’ she’d called, grasping him by the arm. Her breath was hot. He couldn’t understand what she was saying, wished he could remember her name. She lost her grip on his arm momentarily, stumbled and fell against him. A passer-by, a man in his fifties, intervened on Adrian’s behalf and grasped the woman by the arm. The woman shrieked and in trying to pull herself free fell backwards, landing heavily on the ground before scuttling away through the legs of the onlookers. The man brushed at Adrian’s arm, as if to remove the woman’s touch.

‘Sorry, sorry! That woman is a crazy woman. No family.’ And touched his finger lightly to his temple, a butterfly taking to the wing.

Adrian shook his head, flustered, disappointed at the failure of his own response, but when he looked about for the woman she had gone.

He thinks about her sometimes, thinks of her now, at the open window. For days he had waited for her. But she never came.

It is nearly one o’ clock. Lunchtime. These days he is acutely aware of the hours of breakfast, lunch and dinner. Meals have become more than punctuation marks in his day, they have become events in themselves. When he was a young man, doing his training in the hospital, there were times when he would forget to eat. While he was preparing for his doctorate he would leave his books to run across the road and buy a slice of pizza from the takeaway opposite; unwilling even to wait the minutes it took the Greek owner to warm it, he would eat it as he made his way back to his study, cold congealed cheese and curled ham.

He closes the window, trapping the sounds on the other side of the glass. There is dust from the sill on his palms, a fine, red, ubiquitous dust that covers everything. At this time of year it hangs in the air, a red mist, obscuring the hills behind the city, hovering above the horizon. Adrian feels the dust in the back of his throat every time he breathes; his skin and nose itch, the wind sucks the moisture out of his pores. He finds a handkerchief in his pocket, he has taken to carrying one again, dampens it with bottled water and rubs at his palms. And though rust-coloured stains rise on the white cloth, he feels as if all he is doing is working the dust into the layers of skin. There are days he feels constantly soiled, can feel the dust trapped beneath his shirt, clinging to his damp skin.