Zambezi (16 page)

Hassan bin Zayid wiped his sweaty palm on his Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt then returned it to the grip on the throttle of the outboard motor.

The inflatable Zodiac tender bore the name
Faith
in white on its sleek, grey rubber flank, the lettering the same as that on his forty-foot motor cruiser. Underneath the name was the port of registration,
Zanzibar
. While Hassan spent most of his time these days at his private game reserve in Zambia, he would always consider the aromatic island off the coast of mainland Tanzania his real home.

It was to Zanzibar that he had retreated to deal with the shock of the news that had come by telephone a few days earlier. As he had sat in the cool, dark interior of the lodge’s bar, nursing three fingers of Scotch on ice, he had realised that the one person left in the world whom he truly loved was dead.

He had summoned Juma, the lodge’s manager in his absence and his personal valet while Hassan was in residence. Juma was a devout Muslim, so Hassan did not insult him by offering him alcohol.

Instead, he poured the tall African a glass of orange juice as he walked into the bar.

‘Sit, old friend,’ Hassan said.

Juma nodded and seated himself on a bar stool. ‘I am sorry for your loss. I feel your pain.’

‘Thank you, Juma. Things have changed for me with this news. I must leave the lodge.’

Juma nodded again. ‘You will go to Zanzibar?’

‘Yes. And I may not return.’

Juma’s eyes widened. His whole adult life had been in the service of Hassan bin Zayid and Hassan’s father. His mother had been Hassan’s mother’s maid. He and the handsome, pale-skinned heir to the family fortune had played together as children. Hassan’s schooling abroad had separated them, but the bond between them could never be severed, not even when they had inevitably settled into a master-servant relationship. ‘Am I to stay here?’

‘For the time being. There are things we need to discuss, you and I. You have served my family, served me all your life.’

‘Yes. Willingly’ Juma suddenly feared that his employment was about to be terminated, along with his association with the sad-eyed man opposite him.

Hassan forced a smile, but only a brief one. ‘Don’t worry, old friend. I’m not giving you the sack.

In fact, I need you now more than ever. I need to know if you will help me through this difficult time.’

‘You know I would die for you.’

There was an awkward silence. Neither man was given to emotional outbursts – not in front of another man, at least – and the declaration took them both a little by surprise. Hassan felt tears welling up behind his eyes, but blinked them back. ‘Thank you, Juma, but I hope it won’t come to that.’

Their conversation ended with a set of orders. Once Juma had left, Hassan dialled the number of a travel agency in Dar es Salaam. The owner answered the phone. They exchanged the briefest of pleasantries.

‘You are coping … with the news?’ the man asked.

‘I am. I’m planning a trip, away from here for a while. I’m leaving late tonight or early tomorrow.

I’d like to catch up with you.’ He paced around the stone floor of the bar as he spoke into the portable phone.

‘That could be difficult. I’m going to be very busy in the next few days.’

Hassan panicked. Having made his decision, and enlisted Juma’s support, he could not afford to be brushed off. ‘Remember you asked me something a year ago, when you came to stay at my lodge?’

There was a pause on the other end of the line. ‘This is not a good time to talk, Hassan.’

‘That’s why I want to see you in person. But you do remember the conversation? The
business
proposition you put to me last year?’

‘Of course.’

‘I want in.’

‘It’s not as easy as that. I’m not even sure you would fit into our organisation.’

Hassan’s worry turned to annoyance. ‘You were keen enough when you wanted my money.’

‘You’re not the only rich man in Africa.’

‘How about money plus local knowledge and contacts? You know the resources at my disposal’

Hassan was aware the man was just being cautious. It paid to be in his line of business. He guessed he knew that Hassan’s change of mind had been brought on by the sudden death of the person closest to him.

‘OK, Hassan. We can meet. At the hotel. The one you wanted to buy a few years ago.’

‘I’ll come by boat. At the beach bar, on Tuesday, midday.’

‘I will be there.’

He replaced the portable phone in its cradle and sat down heavily on the bar stool. As he poured another Scotch the shaking in his hand caused the neck of the bottle to tinkle on the rim of the heavy cut-glass tumbler.

He stared again at the photo of himself with his father and twin brother, Iqbal.

The brothers dressed differently, they wore their hair differently, they dated completely different types of women. Who was his girl at the time the photo was taken? Felicity, that was it. The blonde from conservative middle England who’d been a classmate at university. She’d said she loved his hair. She’d sought him out – not surprising as he gave his father’s Zanzibar address to almost any pretty girl he met. Iqbal had spoken of a Pakistani girl, from a reputable family, who was returning to her home country In so many other ways the brothers were growing apart, but neither of them could turn a blind eye to a pretty woman.

Their eyes, however, marked them as twins. So similar, as blue as the Indian Ocean, his mother had always said. Yet even here, in this blurred snapshot, one could see different souls behind each pair of indigo portals. Hassan’s sparkled with carefree abandon – he’d either just had sex or was about to, he couldn’t quite remember which. Iqbal’s were cooler. Distant. Barely tolerating the forced bonhomie of the reunion, eager to get back to something else, something more … meaningful. His woman? No, she was already in Pakistan by then, and he would follow a few days after the brief holiday on the island. Was it a woman who had lured his brother so irrevocably away from his own world?

No, he didn’t think so. It might have been easier for Hassan to understand his brother, and his fate, if he had been led to it by his prick. But it was something with an even stronger influence, something which Hassan had never had, that separated them so completely.

Faith.

Sometimes, when he sat on the verandah and watched a breathtaking sunset – he remembered one particularly vivid crimson and gold cloud show he and Miranda had witnessed before making love – he was tempted to believe there was a God. But his God, at least the God of his father and his brother, would not tolerate his union with the American woman, an unbeliever. His father had married outside his religion, although Hassan’s mother had apparently promised to convert. She never did, though, and her husband never forgave her, and not only for her failure to relinquish Christianity. Neither the Christian nor Muslim god had blessed the union of the elder Hassan bin Zayid, tour guide and coffeeshop owner of Stone Town, Zanzibar, and Margaret Wilks, British Overseas Airways Corporation air hostess, of Buckinghamshire, England.

‘The only good thing that ever came of it was you two boys,’ their father had told Hassan and Iqbal on many occasions. Usually after he had partaken of the better part of a bottle of expensive Scotch.

The funny thing was, Hassan remembered his mother saying almost exactly the same thing when he last saw her. He had few recollections of her from his childhood. Margaret had left Zanzibar for good shortly after the twins’ third birthday. All Hassan remembered was a golden-haired woman singing to him and, significantly, crying. The only version Hassan had of the marriage was his father’s.

‘She left you boys. Abandoned you when you were tiny What mother would leave her children?’

One night when the boys were eleven they snuck out of their bedroom window and dropped as silently as they could onto the tin roof of the next-door dwelling. It was a favourite game, scrabbling across the interconnected rooftops, peering through skylights and neighbourhood windows, daring each other to leap the gaps between houses. On this night they were returning to bed, after seeing old Mrs Jamal getting undressed – an experience neither of them wanted to repeat – when they overheard their father’s baritone voice. The smell of his Marlboro cigarette smoke wafted up from where he sat on the stone steps leading to the reception area of the small hotel he owned. Another man sat in a plastic chair beside the steps. Hassan didn’t recognise the stranger’s voice, but that didn’t matter.

Thinking his sons were tucked in bed asleep, his father was telling the story of his failed marriage.

‘She was a beauty, that much was true.’

‘And good, eh? I hear the English girls
love
it,’ the stranger interjected.

Iqbal looked at Hassan with puzzlement in his eyes. He thought his mother was
bad
. Hassan shrugged, just as confused.

The elder bin Zayid gave a little grunt. ‘Yes. At first, I suppose. As in any marriage. Except we weren’t married.’

‘Ah … and she got pregnant.’

‘It happens, Bilal.’

‘But a foreigner … why didn’t she have an abortion? Surely you offered.’

‘I did. But she would not hear of it. I didn’t mind marrying her.’

‘But your father?’

‘God rest his soul, he refused to speak to me.’

‘What’s an abortion?’ Hassan whispered.

Iqbal pantomimed a hand holding a knife, then plunged it into his belly ‘Women kill their own children when they do not want them.’

‘No!’

‘Yes. Mohamed’s sister, the older one. She has a woman’s magazine, from England. There is an article in there about it,’ Iqbal explained, revelling in his worldliness.

‘I’m glad our mother didn’t do that!’ Hassan said.

‘Shush! Listen.’

Their father stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Everyone thought I was mad, of course, not just my father. I was shunned but, to tell you the truth, I didn’t mind at first. I had a sexy, worldly wife and I wanted the children.’

‘So what was the problem?’

‘She said she wanted to come live here, to quit her job, to which I said, “Of course, this is the way it should be.’”

‘What was wrong with that?’

‘Even me saying that. She said she was making decisions because they were what
she
wanted, and that if she wanted to return to work when the boys were older, then she would.’

‘A woman working while her children are at home? Preposterous.’ Bilal shook his head emphatically.

‘That’s what I told her. I also suggested that she might like to dress a little more conservatively once we were married. That did not go down well either.’

‘Why do they insist on dressing like whores, these western women?’

Hassan senior smiled. ‘Of course, I didn’t mind when we were dating, but she was pregnant with my sons, and we were married, so I naturally thought she would start acting like a proper, modest wife. But me telling her to do things only made her do the opposite.’

‘In Pakistan, we know how to treat women.’ Bilal held up a fist.

Hassan senior nodded. ‘I never hit her. Maybe I should have.’

‘Let’s go,’ Hassan whispered to his brother. He had a feeling he didn’t want to hear any more of this conversation. He had recently found a photograph – old, faded, dog-eared – in the drawer of his father’s desk. The study was out of bounds, but his ballpoint pen had run out of ink and he needed another in order to finish his homework. His father had been downstairs in reception, welcoming a couple of foreign tourists. Amidst the clutter of the drawer was the picture. It was of a slender, fairhaired woman in a uniform. She was standing outside the terminal at Zanzibar airport, the name visible in the background. She had one hand on her hip and a handbag hanging on her shoulder.

Hassan had replaced the photo, wondering if it was his mother.

‘No, this is just getting interesting,’ Iqbal insisted.

‘So things got worse?’ Bilal asked.

‘They were good for a while. She settled down while she was pregnant, but there were problems after the birth.’

‘Medical problems?’

‘No, it was her head. She was depressed. We had a nanny, of course, an African woman whose husband had drowned while fishing. She had a baby boy of her own, little Juma. Ended up raising my two in the end. But the boys’ mother … it was as if she didn’t want them. It was strange, because she had been against abortion.’

‘Women are strange creatures.’

He shrugged. ‘Anyway, she got used to the boys, but after a few months she started all that nonsense again about going back to work. I mean, jet-setting around the world, here today, gone tomorrow … how can a woman raise kids like that, Bilal?’

‘Impossible.’

‘Of course, I forbade it. She threatened to divorce me.’

‘On what grounds – that you cared about her and wanted her to be a good mother?’ Bilal’s incredulity was clear from the tone of his voice.

‘She said it was like being in prison. Like I was treating her as my slave.’

‘This is no prison. More like a palace.’ Bilal looked up at the four-storey whitewashed hotel, sandwiched between a souvenir shop and the small cafe Hassan had owned when he met the twins’ mother. The boys hastily ducked their heads back away from the rain gutter as the stranger looked up.

‘It got worse. I went to the mainland for a few days, on business. I came home a day early and there was a man in my house. An Englishman.’

‘A married woman entertaining another man in the family home? Were they … ?’

‘They were clothed, if that’s what you mean. Having coffee at ten in the morning, on
my
balcony, in
my
home. She didn’t try to hide him. Said he was a
friend
. That’s what made it worse, Bilal, that she had no shame about having a strange man in the house.’

‘So, had she been sleeping with him as well?’

‘Yes. The truth came out eventually. She said I did not pay enough attention to her, treated her more like a slave than a wife. What a joke. At least from a slave I would have had sex.’

Bilal shook his head and made a clucking noise with his tongue.