The Memory of Love (6 page)

He sat still for a moment or two, thinking his own thoughts. Then grunted softly, as if he had made sense of the story or recalled his reason for telling it.

‘Now there’s a bridge. Built by the Germans. You can drive across to the city. Doesn’t take a minute. How about that?’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I cross that bridge every day.’

‘Ah, you live on the peninsula.’

‘Who was she? The woman?’ I asked.

‘No idea,’ he answered. ‘A good soul. Or maybe not. Just an ordinary woman who did one good thing. Either way, without her I wouldn’t be here now. I would have been more grateful if I’d had any idea of the favour she had done me.’ He jumped up, suddenly animated. ‘Let’s have some music!’

‘I should be going.’ I stood up.

‘I’ll drive you,’ he said. ‘In just a few minutes.’ He turned and disappeared into the house. ‘What do you like?’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Fela Kuti?’

Music was not something I cared for. I didn’t own a record player, only a radio. I replied, ‘Yes, why not. Fela Kuti.’

‘Or your namesake?’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Oh come on, Elias!’ He slipped a record from its sleeve, placed it on the turntable and carefully set the needle on the vinyl. Saffia entered the room, just as it was filled with the sound of Nat King Cole’s voice. Julius reached out his arm to catch her as she passed behind him, spun her around and back towards him. Even caught off guard like that, in Julius’s arms Saffia didn’t miss a beat.

‘You like the music, Elias?’ Julius called over to me.

‘Yes indeed,’ I managed. ‘Very much.’

‘Then you’ll come out with us one of these days. We’ll go to the Talk of the Town. Bring somebody.’

Half an hour later, side by side in the Variant, we drove across the bridge. Either side the moon glittered darkly on the water. Julius said nothing but whistled the Nat King Cole tune. His whistling was off key, but he didn’t seem to mind or even notice. He dropped me outside my house and I thanked him.

‘Any time. Any time at all, my friend.’ He waved as he pulled away. Rather than turn the car, though, he continued straight ahead along the length of the peninsula, the long way round.

At two in the morning I was still awake. My heart was thudding drily in my chest. Thoughts traced circles in my mind. I rehearsed different moments, parts of the evening’s conversation. For whatever reason I found myself thinking of Julius almost as much as of Saffia. Eventually I got up out of bed. I groped my way to the kitchen, found the light and turned it on and poured myself a glass of water from the tap. My notebook was there on the table. I sat down and jotted down a few details, in part because I feared I might forget them, but mainly because I needed to exorcise them from my mind.

Finally I went back to bed and fell into a fitful sleep.

Is that where it began? In the garden before the splendour of the Harmattan lilies? Or afterwards, as I watched the two of them dance together? Or weeks before at the faculty wives’ dinner? It’s difficult to say. Beginnings are so hard to trace. Perhaps we three would each put the beginning in a different place, like blindfolded players trying to pin the tail on a donkey.

Three different beginnings. Three different endings, one for each of us.

CHAPTER 4

The Talk of the Town. I forget what brought me to pass by there a few years ago, but I found myself in the vicinity and wandered in through an unlocked door. It goes by some other name now, the fourth or fifth in however many years. I forget exactly. The Ruby Rooms, the Ruby Lounge? Otherwise nothing had changed.

Inside, the same red carpet, mapped with dark stains and chewed at the edges. In the half-light the pockmarked velvet of the banquettes, peeling fake-wood surfaces of the tables, like one of the girls from outside the City Hotel in the cold light of morning. The dance floor seemed ludicrously small and even empty the place felt cramped; the air was foul, dense with the odour of sweat, sour beer and urinals. A piano stool stood alone on the platform, but no evidence of the piano. A man was stacking empty drink crates. He did not look up or take the trouble to greet me, sparing me the obligation of having to explain myself.

Julius and Saffia and Vanessa and I. Thirty years ago. Together we stepped through the door and on to the lush red carpet. Four old friends to anyone looking from the outside. The atmosphere redolent with cigarette smoke, the vapour of strong spirits. Julius, carrying his jacket over his shoulder, led the way; Saffia and Vanessa followed close behind. I came last. I had heard of the Talk of the Town, though this was my first visit. Vanessa had been before, of course. Truth to tell I preferred bars, and visited them when I wanted to get out of my own space. Not to seek companionship; I preferred contemplation to conversation. And I had never liked, even feared a little, these kinds of public places. As I say, I cared little for music, and though I was a competent dancer, my talents in that direction had certainly never been remarked upon.

Vanessa turned her head this way and that, trying to see who was there and also to reassure herself of the effect of her entrance. She wore a strapless yellow dress I had seen before, though on someone else. On her head she wore some kind of hair adornment held in place by pins stuck into her scalp. The whole arrangement was spiky and dangerous-looking. As she swung her head around it seemed, at any moment, as if Vanessa might catch a stranger’s eye, though not perhaps in the way she imagined.

Someone who knew Julius stopped him and so I guided (herded) the two women onwards looking out for a table. It was moments such as these I disliked about being out in public. Thankfully Vanessa took charge of the moment, shooting ahead to where a group were just vacating a table. As they gathered themselves together she slipped through the throng, slid her bottom along the banquette and plopped her handbag on the table in front of her like a trophy. I followed, stepping aside to allow Saffia into the banquette, and then sat down opposite her on one of the stools.

It was the first time I’d been able to look at Saffia properly all evening. They had collected us in the Variant, Saffia switching places to sit next to Vanessa in the back, while I sat up front with Julius. Now she leaned forward on to the table, pausing to inspect the surface and wipe it with a spare serviette before resting her forearms on the surface. Her arms were bare, she wore a cream dress with a scooped neck, large black polka dots, caught at the waist with a black belt, a matching scarf draped behind her. I noticed such things, most men don’t. Or so we maintain, at any rate, for fear it would diminish us to admit it, I suppose. But more than that, I remember every moment of that evening.

Next to Saffia, Vanessa sat looking around, wearing a slightly sullen expression she imagined passed for sophistication. Saffia leaned forward and whispered something in Vanessa’s ear. And judging by the smirk that appeared on Vanessa’s face, I dare say Saffia was congratulating her upon her wits in securing the table.

We ordered drinks. Saffia asked for a ginger ale. I urged her to accept a real drink. She shook her head. I told the man to bring her a rum and Coke, whisky for me. Saffia requested a Guinness for Julius, who had yet to reappear. My back was to the room, to the dance floor. The room throbbed with sound. Impossible to talk over the din. Saffia, seemingly unconcerned, leant forward, smiling, watching the dancers behind my head.

Presently the waiter arrived with our drinks. Something scarlet and sticky, for Vanessa, imported and doubly expensive for it. I watched as Saffia sipped her drink, bending her head to the glass. She leaned back, caught my eye and smiled.

‘How is it?’

Yes, she nodded and began to hum, moving her head to the beat of the music. ‘Julius says I have no head for drink. It’s true. Not like him. When we were students I used to drive them all home at the end of the evening. I never really acquired a tolerance for it. Now I am stuck with driving.’

At least that is more or less what I think she said; what I caught were phrases, punctuated by the bass beat. ‘You studied together?’

She nodded.

‘Engineering?’

She cupped her hand around an ear for me to repeat myself. She laughed, leaning back into the seat, shaking her head. I felt foolish.

‘Botany,’ she said.

‘Flowers?’

‘Well, plants really. Plant systems, soil. That sort of thing.’ Her eyes slid sideways again, over my shoulder. Watching the dancers, or looking for Julius? Her hands were clasped on the table in front of her, the fingers interlaced. With the nail of her forefinger she began to trace an imaginary circle on the table. I looked at her and our eyes met, for the second time. I held her gaze, as long as I dared. She smiled and looked back at me, and then looked away. For a moment I was unable to breathe. I studied her profile and took a sip from my drink. From a different direction I felt the heat of Vanessa’s glare. I swivelled my stool around, showing her my back, and studied the people dancing.

So you see moments later when Julius joined us at the table the currents between us all were fractionally altered.

Vanessa began to flirt with Julius, of course. Touching his forearm, whispering in his ear, wriggling upon the banquette in time to the music. Julius responded, after a fashion. The record changed, Julius and Saffia stood up to dance, and I, following his lead, asked Vanessa. I accompanied this request with a show of courtesy, helping her out from behind the table, and this mollified her somewhat. We followed the other two on to the crowded floor.

Later we strolled on to the terrace, easing our way through tables of people taking a respite from the music, their faces glowing beneath the clarity of the moon. Julius seemed to recognise a good few people, or at any rate they knew him. He was the kind of person they call the life and soul of the party. Life and soul. Life
and
soul, without whom the rest of us collectively comprised nothing more than an inert corpse. Vanessa had found somebody, an age mate, a girl in a shiny black dress, and they were standing a distance away, whispering, shielding their lips from view behind the backs of their hands.

Saffia and I were alone.

A blind man sat with his back against the wall. She said, ‘Look at his smile. Why do you think he’s smiling like that?’

‘The music?’ I replied.

‘Yes, perhaps.’

We both watched the blind man. He sat, a great smile on his upturned face. He wasn’t tapping his feet, or marking the beat with his hand. He was just smiling.

Saffia said, ‘But do you notice how often blind people smile? Or don’t. Sometimes cry. I once saw a blind man in the street, the tears pouring down his face, he was quite alone. I thought about him for a long time; perhaps it’s a lack of self-consciousness, you know. They don’t realise people are watching them.’

‘Does that make it better or worse?’

‘I can’t help thinking it could only improve things if we all said and did exactly what we felt.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ I said. ‘Do you really believe that? About the blind?’

‘Yes. I do.’ She watched the blind man, frowned slightly and then added, ‘And of course, he doesn’t even know I’m looking at him now.’

Saffia watched the blind man and I watched her.

‘Dance with me,’ I said, because it was uppermost in my mind. I could think of nothing else until I had voiced that one thought.

And so we danced. The way she danced with me, as though the act required concentration. Or perhaps it was just the rum, perhaps it had gone to her head, though with the effect of forcing her to focus rather than relaxing her. Her hand on my shoulder. My hand at her waist. I had taken her to be taller. Between our bodies, a few inches of warm air. She kept her eyes averted from me.

As we danced I tried to inhabit the moment to remember it for later. I had it in my hand, and then it was gone. I walked her back out on to the terrace.

There was Vanessa. Mouth like a wet prune, wearing an expression that made her face look as though the skin was stretched over a substructure of granite. Not a word all the way home. I remember Julius passing silent comment, the way men do. A surreptitious slap on the back as we parted. He slipped into the passenger seat next to Saffia, and as he did so he wagged his finger, grinned, raised an eyebrow and shot a glance at Vanessa and then back at me, as if to say, ‘Elias, you old rascal.’

CHAPTER 5

Thursday, he is called to attend a child. The address he is given is the local police station. Inside a row of people wait upon a bench. Through a door left partly ajar Adrian can see several police officers. One, a fat woman officer with a hairstyle as elaborate as a prom queen’s, sits at a desk. A male officer is perched on the edge talking to her. Two others stand close by. There is the occasional sound of laughter. Adrian hovers outside, waiting to be noticed. Someone glances in his direction, and away again. He raps on the door. Soft, even-spaced knocks. The woman at the desk waves at him to wait. He moves away to lean against the wall. When, finally, he is called inside and states his name, they exclaim and apologise. Not a crime victim then, somebody important. He should have said so.

Adrian follows the woman officer down the corridor, in silence except for the sound of her uniform trousers rubbing together between her enormous thighs. By a door she stops and gestures to Adrian to enter. He peers through the glass. A child sits alone in the empty room.

‘What do you want me to do?’ he asks.

‘Well.’ She shrugs as though she wonders why
he
should be asking
her
. ‘They want you to examine him.’

Adrian approaches the boy and squats down in front of him.

‘What’s your name?’ The boy looks at Adrian through dark, unblinking eyes. He doesn’t answer though his gaze is steady.

‘Your name?’ bawls the woman from the doorway. The sound makes Adrian start. He turns and holds up a hand, but fails to impress her. ‘An idiot.’ And shakes her head, sucking her teeth as she does so. When Adrian turns back the child is still watching him. Adrian regards him for a few moments. He wonders what kind of trouble the boy is in.

‘Excuse me,’ he says to the officer, keeping the dislike out of his voice. ‘Can you leave us a moment?’

She shakes her head. ‘This is a police station.’

Adrian nods, pulls out his notebooks and pens. Under the eye of the policewoman he circles the child scribbling notes until he sees her lose interest and begin to examine the polish work on her nails. Then he moves behind the child and drops his notebook, swearing loudly as he does so. The policewoman straightens up. The child doesn’t move.

The child is a simpleton, Adrian tells the officer in charge. The policeman wants to know what he is supposed to do with the boy. Something in his manner suggests the problem is of Adrian’s making. So Adrian tells him to release the child into his custody and signs off on the paperwork as though he had done so many times before. A flurry of rubber stamping and countersignatures and he is shown the door.

Minutes later, hand in hand with the boy, he stands outside the police station. Adrian’s heart is beating. His armpits are damp, the sweat like ice water. He has no real idea what to do with the boy, he simply couldn’t bear to leave him in that place. Suddenly the child pulls away and darts off into the traffic. Before Adrian can even think of following, he is gone. Adrian turns and looks up at the police station, but nobody seems to be looking.

Four people are jammed into the back seat of the taxi on the way to the hospital. The woman next to him carries a basket containing some kind of fermented food; the yeasty odour mingles with her own smell and that of her perfume. Adrian has never uncovered the alchemic combination of words and fare that would secure him hire of a taxi on his own.

Inside the hospital the staff room is empty. On the two-ring electric hob coffee is simmering in a long-handled, stainless-steel pot. The bubbles rise and burst on the surface like lava. Among the mugs Adrian finds one less stained than the others and rinses it. The coffee is grainy and bitter, reminds him of the pretend coffee he made from acorns as a child. It coats his tongue and turns his saliva sour.

In this heat, he feels like a sleepwalker. His movements are laboured, he can feel the ponderous workings of his brain. He leans back and waits for the caffeine to snap through his system, the nerve endings quivering into life, prickling his skin.

Right now he’d like to talk to somebody, but who? From the desk he dials his home telephone number, listens to the ringing echo hollowly down the line. He counts. A click and Lisa’s voice comes on the line. He listens to her cool, chirpy voice telling callers to leave a name and number. He replaces the receiver without speaking. What would he have said, anyway? To Lisa foreign countries were as alien and remote as Venus. World events revolved continuously, independent of human agency. War, coups, poverty – these existed on a par with viruses, cyclones and black holes in space. One expended emotion with economy. He could have told her about the deaf boy at the police station, anticipated the pause, the deft change of subject on to some more positive, more easily comprehensible matter. It had attracted him at first, brought him back to himself, her brisk, upbeat way of being. He had mistaken it, at first, for a certain tenderheartedness, a tendency to easy bruising.

Later he showers. Standing beneath the spout of water, he feels the urge to urinate. He stands at the edge of the tiled shower cubicle and aims at the toilet bowl. Success brings with it his first sense of achievement of the day.

The shower leaves him only temporarily refreshed. The heat soon takes over again, covering his skin and turning it clammy. In the kitchen he surveys the contents of the fridge, takes a can of evaporated milk, holds it up and lets it trickle into his open mouth.

How quickly one reverts.

He makes himself a cup of instant coffee and then pours into it two fingers of whisky. What he’d really like is a bottle of wine. The satisfying pull of the cork, the guarantee of a long evening suffused in an alcoholic glow. He settles on the couch, takes a cushion from one of the other chairs and places it behind his back. But the inertia prevents him even from reading; instead he stares at a spot on the floor and sips his drink. It is not quite eight o’clock. The evening rolls out ahead of him, like an unlit road.

A knock on the door. The laundry man delivering his clothes. At the third knock Adrian levers himself to his feet.

On the doorstep is Kai Mansaray, dressed much the same as before, only this time he is holding a glass-covered wooden board.

‘Sorry, I thought it was somebody else.’ Adrian steps aside to allow him inside.

‘Oh yeah? Who do you owe money?’ Kai laughs.

‘No. Just my clothes back from the laundry, that’s all.’

‘Well, if that’s what you have to look forward to, it’s as well I came around.’ He steps forward and places the board on the coffee table.

Adrian can’t remember when he last saw a Ludo board. The one Kai sets on the table carries with it the taste of tomato soup, the scent of wax crayons, the rubber-and-sweat smell of the school gymnasium. This is the game he has seen grown men playing in the street, on outsize boards decorated with photographs of footballers and actors.

Adrian pours Kai a tumbler of whisky. They open with the best of three. Kai wins easily and challenges Adrian again. Adrian, who has watched Kai’s strategy closely, has worked out a thing or two, takes the fifth game and the sixth as well. They play double colours. Blue and green: Kai. Red and yellow: Adrian. Adrian mixes the whisky with water to stretch it. Kai plays intensely. Adrian is grateful for the company. In the kitchen he finds a packet of chocolate chip cookies. The cookies are soft and dusty. The chocolate has melted, seeped into the stratum and hardened. They eat the cookies in place of supper, washing the taste away with whisky.

Six sets later, Adrian concedes and leans back in his chair. Fleetingly the events of the morning come back into his mind. For a moment he considers raising the subject of the deaf boy, but chooses not to. If Kai had been a European, it might have been different. Conversation here can be challenging, language is a blunter instrument, each word a heavy black strike with a single meaning. To say exactly what you mean, to ask precisely the right question, this is what has to be done. For the bluntness of the language doesn’t mean people speak their minds. Rather, they use the spaces to escape into.

Besides, he is enjoying the sense of oblivion seeping into him, a result of the whisky and the pleasing monotony of the board game. He feels as close to content as he has done since he arrived. He pours more whisky. The bottle is almost finished.

For a while they sit together in silence. Adrian leaves the room to use the bathroom; when he comes back Kai is leafing through the papers on the side table. He does this in an entirely natural way, unperturbed by Adrian’s reappearance. He extracts a sheet.

‘Yours?’

Adrian nods.

The sketch is of a songbird, made by Adrian the previous day. Since he came here he has resumed this schoolboy pastime. Among his junior-school friends, in that fleeting phase of boyhood when the tide of energy is still displaced into the wholesome, while his friends collected football cards and stamps, Adrian drew the birds he saw from his window: sparrows, blackbirds, crows, thrushes, robins at different times of day, weathers and seasons, in all their moods and guises.

The birds here are extraordinary, even the ones that sit on the telegraph post visible from his window: sunbirds, flycatchers, shrikes, kingfishers, pied crows. In the distance kites and the occasional vulture spiral down on currents of air above the city. Birds that would have been buried treasure to his thirteen-year-old self. He fumbled through the first sketches, frequently flexing his fingers, knowing enough to keep adding lines, resist the eraser. Gradually his talent has grown back. He wants to buy some paints. Yesterday he saw a bird whose wing feathers were of a near neon orange. He would never have believed such a colour existed in nature.

Kai replaces the sketch in silence and picks up a photograph in a green leather frame, of the kind that close upon themselves, a travelling photograph frame. A gift from Lisa. ‘This your wife?’

‘Yes,’ replies Adrian. ‘Lisa.’

A pause. And because he is trying not to show how discomfited he is by Kai’s lack of niceties and because the notion that a conversation is a continuous act is bred into his bones and silences like nudity should be covered up lest they offend, Adrian asks, ‘How long have you worked here?’

Kai puts Lisa’s picture back upon the shelf. ‘Four years. Something like that.’

‘And before?’

‘There was no before.’ He cranes his neck sideways to read the titles of the books on the shelf; his back is to Adrian, who persists. ‘You were studying?’

‘Yup.’

‘Of course. So where did you do your medical studies?’ Adrian expects Kai to name an overseas university, in the United States or Britain, possibly one of the former Soviet bloc countries.

‘Here.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yup. Local boy.’

‘The whole lot?’

Kai nods.

‘So you’ve never visited Britain?’

‘Nope.’ Kai accents the word, shaking his head, turns and places his whisky glass on the table.

Why this is such a surprise Adrian cannot quite say, something in Kai’s manner, he struggles to put his finger on it. ‘Have you ever been outside the country?’

Kai shakes his head. ‘Leave? When we have so much here?’ He laughs and drains his glass.

Adrian pours the last of the whisky, leaving the empty bottle on the table. He takes a sip, and then another, pacing the drink. The whisky has gone to his head. He remembers he hasn’t eaten properly and closes his eyes. Behind his lids the blackness turns liquid. He wonders if he doesn’t feel faintly unwell. He opens his eyes, feels the stab of light against his retina before his pupils have time to contract. Coffee is what he needs. He rises and makes his way to the kitchenette, tinkers with the kettle and cups. It is later than he thought. Outside invisible dust thickens the air. Tomorrow the hills above the city will have disappeared from view. He remembers the flight across the Sahara, watching the dust rolling across the dunes, gathering force and height until it extinguished the view from the window.

When he returns Kai is lying with his head back and his eyes closed. Adrian stands with the two cups in his hand. There is something compelling in looking at a sleeping person. In the early days he would watch Lisa asleep, right up close, feeling her breath on his face. If she woke up, when she woke up, their eyes met. She didn’t start or flinch. And so with strangers, even a stranger on a bus, there is a shadow of that same intimacy. Something in the freedom of the gaze, to look without being seen, a kind of power, a stolen intimacy. Kai’s skin, bright and unblemished. Unshaven; the hair grows on Kai’s face in sparse, erratic bursts. He wears his hair in an unfashionable style for the times. In contrast to the cropped or smooth-shaved heads of many black men Kai’s hair grows thickly and tufted to an inch or two.

The beard and the hair conceal his youth; he is much younger, Adrian thinks, much younger than at first imagined. This makes Adrian by far the senior. He realises why he was surprised to learn Kai had never left his country, never left Africa. It is the worldliness he carries with him, all the more noticeable now for being momentarily dissipated.

On the arm of the settee a single finger taps out an unheard rhythm.

‘Coffee?’ says Adrian, suddenly awkward.

‘Sure, why not?’ Kai answers. He does not open his eyes. Adrian places a cup on the table, where the liquid sloshes gently in the cup. Kai opens his eyes, reaches for it.