Turbulent Wake

by Paul E. Hardisty

  The twenty-three-year-old incarnation of my mother stands on that bridge with the damaged but still hopeful twenty-five-year-old version of my father. Her words come to me again, as they have so often since I first read them last night: this is the time when dreams die. Mine sure did. In the end, hers did too. Maybe we’re all better off without them.

  Probabilities

  ‘Are you still coming?’ he yelled into the marine radiotelephone handset.

  ‘You have to say “over” and then let go of the talk button,’ said the ship’s radio operator, unshaven, red-eyed.

  ‘Sorry.’ He pushed down the long black button on the handset. ‘Over.’

  A second later he heard his own heavily distorted voice repeated, filtered and bounced off the troposphere, relayed through Amsterdam into the European phone network and across to Canada. She was there, somewhere, on the other end. The radio operator tuned the dials, modulating the frequency against a background of a thousand conversations that crowded the restless atmosphere. It sounded like a kid’s slide whistle, up and back.

  ‘I’ve lost Amsterdam,’ the radioman said. ‘Sorry. It’s the damned weather. Hang on and I’ll try to get them back.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. He had waited for this moment for so long and yet now that he was about to speak to her again, he was filled with dread. ‘It’s impossible to make a long-distance call from this country. None of the phones work.’

  ‘No problem. I’ll do my best,’ the radio operator replied in a thick Dutch accent, guttural and round. ‘What are you doing in a shithole like this anyway?’ the man added, continuing to twirl the radio’s frequency dial between thumb and forefinger as if it were an erect black nipple.

  ‘Trying to help, I guess.’ He looked around the cramped radio room and then out of the porthole towards the confused lights of Takoradi harbour. Four and a half months he had been here now, almost twice as long since he had seen her last, waving goodbye as he stepped into the taxi outside the little house she rented with two other veterinary students in Calgary. He was here working to provide clean groundwater to isolated villages, rehabilitating their old and rusted-out wells.

  So far, he didn’t feel like he had helped much.

  Village kids were still as likely as not to drink from the shallow muddy water holes, running the same risk of ingesting the copepods that carried the dracunculus larvae. Once infected, their little bodies became nurseries for developing guinea worms, and then, mating grounds. It still sickened him to think of it, parasites coupling inside a living human being, the male nematodes dying after mating, the females absorbing their hapless partners and then burrowing their nether ends through the host’s flesh, down along the smooth contours of long bones, through tendon sheaths and around joints, groundward, navigating by gravity. And worst was the result. He should have been immune to it by now: the fiery, weeping blisters at the foot or lower leg where the female worm, now up to a metre long, poked its sex end through the victim’s skin, like a piece of spaghetti emerging from a watery bolognese. Strategically placed, head still buried deep within the host, feeding, her sex wantonly exposed, she spurted thousands of fertilised eggs upon contact with water, ensuring her progeny’s survival. She had to be pulled out, slowly and painfully over months, a millimetre at a time, or cut out. There was no medicinal cure, and the body created no immunity. Only a safe water supply could break the cycle.

  The radioman pulled out a package of cigarettes, duty-free Rothmans, and offered him one.

  He took it and bent to the flame of the man’s lighter, inhaling deeply. ‘Thanks,’ he said, pouring the smoke out through his nostrils. ‘I didn’t smoke before I came here.’

  The radioman adjusted his headset, turned a dial. ‘This place changes you.’

  Of this, he had written to her every day, long letters in which he had tried to describe the asylum ache in his chest – futile attempts to put into words what he was now sure he would never be able to properly express. He told her about the packed-earth and thatch villages, the poor and diseased people, of the smiles of the children, as wide and warm as the continent, of their curiosity and of the crisis of existence they caused him – all of this he poured out in long candlelit pages, entrusted to the uncertain grace of the Ghana Post Corporation.

  But of the other things, he had not written. He did not tell of the visit to the clinic, sitting in the waiting room with dozens of sweating Ghanaians, women mostly, dripping with children, anxiety drawn in deep lines across their faces, the sun hammering on the tin sheet roof, the overhead fan immobile, on strike, dead. He had taken precautions. He was not stupid after all, he told himself, and anyway the test had come out negative. The French doctor, a thin, short, balding man whose name he could no longer remember – was it Rene? Rejean? something like that – had warned him that it might be too soon to tell. The probability was low, he had said, but exposure might still manifest itself. He had advised him to return in a month or so. Then they could be sure.

  Since then he had received just the two letters from her, written in her looping, rounded hand, one on small, girlish stationery, flowered and perfumed, the other on gridded mathematical calculation leaf. She had forgiven him, she had said. That’s what people who loved each other did. That was what commitment was about. It just might work. It would work, she had written.

  ‘I’ve got them back,’ said the radio operator suddenly, handing him the receiver. ‘I don’t know how long for though, so make it quick.’

  ‘Helena, are you there?’ he said, and then: ‘Over.’ The same whining metallic hiss emanated from the device. His fear was like a virus, now, mutating, multiplying, eroding his confidence. How could such a minute probability suddenly seem so impossibly large, almost certain?

  And then, through the electronic haze, he heard a voice, almost unrecognisable as the woman he loved, say: ‘Yes. I hear you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Helena. Sorry for what I did.’

  The radio operator looked up at him, eyebrows raised. He grinned sheepishly back at the man. The line hissed like a wave on a pebble beach.

  ‘Helena? Are you there?’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘The date is set for the twenty-sixth. We have an appointment. The paperwork is done. Are you still coming? Over.’

  ‘I am booked on the KLM flight from Amsterdam a week tomorrow.’

  ‘In a week, then,’ he said.

  ‘Warren, I—.’ Feedback moaned across the line.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I miss—’ he began, but was cut off as the line was severed.

  ‘Do you want me to get her back?’ said the radioman. ‘I can try.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, handing back the receiver. ‘No.’

  He offered money, but the radioman just smiled and waved it away. He made his way through the cramped passageway and out on to the freighter’s deck. The railing was damp in his hands, the night clear and moonless. He looked up at the stars twinkling in the haze. She was not going to come. ‘Nothing,’ she had said. That’s exactly what it was going to be: nothing. He wasn’t even sure why she had entertained the idea in the first place, almost two months ago now, through an exchange of letters. It had been rash of them both. That wasn’t how real decisions were made. And he had treated her badly from the start. Just weeks before leaving for Africa he had left her waiting right through until morning while he had been with someone else, someone he didn’t love, lost in misplaced loyalty, confused, scared. After that, he had lost her for a while and then somehow won her back. And here, he had been unprepared for the warmth of the people and the depth of their thanks, for the girls they had offered him – young, fifteen or sixteen, commanded to disrobe by their fathers, shy smiles under upturned eyes, the men beaming with pride at their daughters’ unsullied beauty. It was better this way.

  He climbed down the rope ladder to the rowboat tied up on the port side. The riveted steel plates of the ship’s hull were rusted and
worn, the paint cracked from years in the tropical sun. He waved thanks to the crewmen, discernible only by the red embers of their cigarettes glowing in the darkness, and turned towards the shore. The smooth surface of the water was a carpet of reflected light, the subtle pinpoints of the cosmos obscured by the phosphorous swathes of the port-complex lights. He leaned into the oars and made for shore.

  Elephants

  He pushed his way through the ten-deep throng towards the railing. Sweating under the five-degree-latitude sun, he scanned the sky, dread rising in his chest. Beyond the runway, the sea stretched out to a muddy-blue horizon.

  A light flashed over the water. It hung a while, close to the horizon, strobing in the haze like a star, and then disappeared. A groan shivered across the observation deck. Someone pointed. The light had reappeared. It was turning, lining up with the runway. Soon you could see the wings and the big pendant turbines, and then the stick-like protrusions of the landing gear, the whole thing seeming to hang in the air, defying gravity as it groped towards the runway. Then a puff of smoke and a delayed chirp-chirp as first the main gear and then the nose wheel hit the tarmac cold at a hundred and twenty knots. Thrust reversers screamed. The jet taxied to a halt. Motorised stairs rolled up to the front and rear doors. Baggage vehicles circled like attentive service robots. The engines spun down and the aircraft stood silent on the apron in a mirage of rising heat. Within the dark ovals of the windows, he could see tiny faces peering out, and he tried to imagine her among them, searching for him.

  The crowd surged forwards. The young engineer, who was now at the railing, braced himself against the weight of bodies pushing from behind.

  The aircraft’s doors opened. Blue-uniformed flight attendants appeared, stood at the top of the stairways. Then the first passengers emerged into the sunshine, blinking and holding their hands above their eyes, and started to make their way down the stairs and along the apron towards the terminal. A group at the far end of the observation platform broke into shrieks, started jumping up and down, waving their hands in the air. One of the passengers, a big African woman in traditional dress, waved back, her smile growing with every step.

  The young engineer scanned back and forth between the front and rear doors and across the column of passengers streaming towards the terminal, the observation platform all around him now alive with people waving, calling out, hugging each other, some crying openly, tears pouring down their smiling faces. Handlers swung the aircraft’s huge, curved belly doors open and began unloading luggage. Still the passengers came. Perhaps two hundred had already crossed the tarmac and entered the terminal building. He’d checked every one. She was not among them.

  He gripped the rail. Should he be surprised? During that last call from the freighter, her voice had been so unsure, so distant, changed somehow. That was three weeks ago.

  He could stop worrying. She had made the decision for him.

  A stewardess appeared at the rear door, waved down to the ground staff. No more passengers. A weight crushed down on him from the inside, a mass of regret. They were better off apart. They were too different: driven by different currents, guided by wholly different instruments. She was stronger than him, more practical, more aware.

  And then she appeared. There was no mistaking her. She towered pale over most of the other passengers, a white sleeveless summer dress billowing around her like the clouds that dotted the horizon. She stopped momentarily at the top of the front stairs and looked out at the sea. Then she started down towards the tarmac. He screamed her name. He jumped up and down and waved his arms in the air. Helena. I don’t believe it. Over here. But she was too far away. She stepped on to the shimmering surface and joined the stream of travellers moving towards the terminal and the fringe of swaying palms.

  She was walking directly towards him now with that long, confident stride he had so admired the first time he had seen her. She seemed to be looking right at him, searching the faces lining the observation deck. He waved again and shouted her name. And then she smiled and waved back at him, and for that instant it had been as if he had known her all his life.

  He woke to the distant sounds of gunfire. Poachers perhaps, or government troops skirmishing with outlaws. He moved closer to her and searched the still-dark sky, listening. She reached for his hand and held it tightly. Through the screened windows of the small caravan, the turbulent symphony of the African night flowed over them. The air was thick with her smell and the deep vapours of the forest. Clouds moved slowly across the earth, obscuring the stars and throwing dark moonshadows over the jungle. Venus appeared, her oceans bright blue, and then was gone. She moved closer to him, moulding her body to his. He could still not quite believe that she was here. Today they would be married.

  Gunfire in the distance again, like fat crackling in a fire.

  She turned her head on the pillow and looked at him. Her eyes were wide and pained.

  ‘I hope it isn’t the elephants,’ she said, turning to look at the lightening sky. Dawn was near. ‘Animals are better than people,’ she whispered. ‘Even predators only kill when they must.’

  He pulled up his pillow and folded one arm behind his head. The new day was slowly colouring the horizon, and he could make out the hills and individual trees and a pillar of woodsmoke rising from a village to the east.

  She turned on to her side and propped herself up on one elbow. ‘Do you know how many forest elephants are left?’ She paused. It was not a rhetorical question.

  ‘You know I don’t, Helena.’

  ‘Well you should. Fewer than ten thousand. That’s half as many as a decade ago, and only a tenth of the population at the turn of the century. We’re here just in time to see them go extinct.’

  ‘Please, Helena. Not today.’

  ‘It’s the truth. What’s wrong with the truth?’

  He had seen it every day for almost four months, this truth. The huge logging trucks trundling night and day from the forest to the coast, carrying single logs as long and thick as buses, the West African forest being devoured one tree at a time and shipped across the sea. He’d seen the small boys employed as human braking systems, hanging from the running boards. He’d watched the trucks tearing through the villages in clouds of red dust, or, if they needed to stop, gearing down until the boys were able to jump to the ground to swing wooden chocks under the front wheels, pulling them out and running forwards again with each sickening lurch as the truck jumped over the chocks once, twice, four times, the chained log smashing into the bed, until finally the wheels stopped turning.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here saving people,’ she said. ‘There are too many people. You should be saving animals.’

  ‘As long as people are poor and suffering, they will exploit the environment. Helping people is the only way to protect the wildlife.’ This was what he had come to understand during his time in London, speaking with university professors and student activists.

  ‘No, Warren, you’re wrong. We will never stop wanting more. The richer we get, the more machines we can buy, the faster we can exploit everything. That’s not the answer. The facts don’t support it. There are just too many people in this world.’

  ‘Lift people from poverty, educate them and birth rates drop.’

  ‘That takes generations. We don’t have generations.’

  He tried to reconcile her words with what they were going to do today, with what he hoped they would do, one day. ‘So, what do you want to do, Helena, just let them die? They’re people, just like you and me. They have as much right…’ He stopped short. She was sitting up in the bed now, the sheet bunched around her midriff, arms crossed under her bare breasts. He looked into her eyes. He leaned over to kiss her, but she put her palm to his chest and pushed him back.

  ‘This is serious, Warren.’

  He tried again, but she turned her head. He managed a glancing peck to her cheek.

  After a while, he said: ‘You know there probably won’t be any vows today. It’s a civil
ceremony, only a justice of the peace.’

  ‘We should we make some promises now, then. Just between us.’ She leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. Her hair fell about their faces, and for that brief moment, it was just the two of them, alone in a cocoon of golden silk. ‘Promise me you will always tell me the truth,’ she breathed. ‘No matter what it is, you will trust me enough to be honest, not hide anything from me.’

  He moved his head back and away from her, looked into her eyes again. ‘I promise.’ Even as he was saying it, he was breaking it. It was meaningless, he told himself, impossible. The promise not to lie was itself a lie. A fever waxed through him, warm, protective.

  She squeezed his hand. ‘Your turn,’ she whispered.

  ‘Don’t ever use sex as a weapon.’

  ‘Have I ever?’

  ‘I hardly know you, Helena.’

  ‘Since you’ve known me, then.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It came out wrong.’ He kissed her on the cheekbone.

  ‘It’s alright,’ she said. ‘I promise. No pre-emptive strike.’

  They lay together, her head cradled in the hollow just beneath his collarbone, her knee drawn up and draped over his thigh, her belly warm and soft against his side, his arm around her shoulders. The sun was almost up.

  He pulled himself up in the bed and lay back against the headboard. ‘When I was working in Turkey a few years ago, my driver Veysil and I went down to a place called Hasankeyf, near the Iraqi border.’ He reached over her to the little side table and picked up the water bottle. ‘Want some?’ he asked, offering it to her.