Lifeboat

by Zacharey Jane

  ‘Then tell us.’

  With a quick movement, she pulled her knees up to her chest, as a girl would, and pushed her hair from her face. She looked away from me and her eyes lost focus.

  In a storytelling voice she began: ‘Listening to the lions rather than a bedtime story. In the evening as the sun went down, he would come to me, supposedly to supervise my prayers, as my mother insisted that I not be brought up a heathen. I needed to be prepared for when we “went back” she said. I don’t think I wanted to “go back”.

  ‘My father would stand by my bed and look down through a cloud of pipe smoke, Bible in hand. “Tonight,” he would say, “the reading will be about a lot of saints from Ecclesiastes II.” Or Genesis I or some other such nonsense. And then he’d sit down at my bedside and look at me straight-faced, but with a twinkle in his eye. I would respond accordingly, folding my hands primly as if in prayer. Then he’d say: “But you look like a girl not easily impressed by saints and their doings – I think we need something much scarier for you. Tell me, young lady, are you scared of lions?” And I’d stay quite serious and say: “No, Father, for I have God and a big stick to defend me.” He’d say: “Good girl – never forget that big stick. Let’s have lions and danger rather than saints and fine doings anytime.”

  ‘Then he’d stride to the window and throw it wide open to the African plains. From the dusty air the sound of lions and hyenas and beasts of all kinds would wend their way in. “Never forget, child,” Father said, “that God is something living and anything else is just the opinions of people we’ve never met.”

  ‘That was my father’s sermon each Sunday. After which we’d sit quietly in the dark and talk about anything until I fell asleep. My father was a writer; I do not think that there were any other children. We lived in Africa and my mother was very beautiful. He would read me his latest work and I was always dazzled by the worlds he built with words, pouring one on top of another like wet sand on a sand castle. Just for me. I always thought he wrote just for me. Imagine my surprise when one Sunday a woman came to visit us wearing a hat and neat hair, carrying my father’s words all bound up in a book between her gloved hands as if she too owned them. I hated her and dropped the teacup from its wobbling saucer all over her pressed together knees. She laughed and brushed it off. My mother did not and later she and Father argued.

  ‘From where I’d been sent early to bed I heard talk of school and manners. That night at prayer time my father burst into my room and strode straight to the window. I could tell he was still angry and, as children always do, I thought I was solely responsible. He threw the window open wide and shouted into the night: “Come and get her, come and take my daughter away you wild beasts, she’s not scared!”

  ‘Then he turned and saw my face. He sat beside me on my bed and let me cry into his shirt, as he stroked my hair and held me tight. “I want you to be brave,” he said, “That’s all I ask. Anything else is rules made up by people we don’t know.”’

  ‘There,’ the woman said, smiling as she ended her tale. ‘There – write in your book: country of origin, Africa.’

  I had been taking notes. It was a start.

  ‘All this came to you in a dream?’

  ‘Not all of it. I did dream of Africa and lions and my father. The rest seemed to come out as I spoke. Or maybe I made it up?’

  ‘Maybe you should spend more time asleep,’ said he, laughing to himself.

  But it seemed like a breakthrough to me and I was confident that sleep, food and shelter would slowly dissipate whatever was blocking their memories.

  We returned to the offices in time for the castaways’ medical assessment. After they’d left me I sat staring at blank paper trying to find suitable words to write down. It could have been a real memory, or it could be something she had read, imagined or simply made up. I had no way of knowing. I found myself laughing. Did I start with lions, or horses or flying fish and guiding stars? I decided to check out authors, probably English speaking and living in Africa, then wrote ‘more information required’ and went for a walk in the sun.

  I thought of my pair, under the moon and stars each night, as I wandered down to the water’s edge. I made myself comfortable on a bench, my back against a warm brick wall. The sun was playing party games across the water, flirting. Sunlight seems to have so much to prove – moonlight prefers mystery. Moonlight is satin and seductive, smoothing the sheets on an enticing dark bed. At night I always want to wade in and let the water wrap around me, but there’s danger there.

  I wondered when the castaways would learn to sleep without their rolling bed.

  The rest of the day was spent behind my desk with my usual work. One letter was a reply from our chief minister to the English prime minister, discussing matters of foreign policy. Usually such an important missive would have held my full attention, but that day my thoughts strayed back to the castaways. To be such a stranger, to oneself as well as the rest of the world. To have nothing to describe oneself by. Do I like apricots? Did I have chicken pox as a child? Did my mother nurse me lovingly through?

  These people did not know if they had mothers. Or brothers, a sister, a father, a family. Measured against such people, my own limited background seemed plentiful. I could answer these questions about myself. They couldn’t, it would seem. To know oneself so little.

  And yet they seemed so self-assured; they showed enviable self-possession. Or was it just shock? I was not equipped to answer and I suppose I should have handed them straight to a doctor or psychologist; but I didn’t. The mystery fascinated me.

  Since starting my job as the interpreter, I had translated for Immigration several times. Lost fishermen mainly, sailors, tourists. I would interview them, retrieve from them the information required by my boss, and return to my desk.

  I could not complete this assignment so easily – mere skill with language would not reveal their identities. But I had been given this assignment because language dictated that only I could communicate with them. I realised I would need more than words and wondered if, for the first time, I might be found wanting. That idea challenged me as much as the mystery of these two castaways fascinated me.

  After work I took a bottle of wine and sat on my verandah, watching the water. I felt restless. The water called to me, promising peace. But I stayed safe behind the verandah railings, watching.

  The waterfront was alive – docksides are not silent until the very early hours of morning. I think that’s why I’d chosen to live in this suburb of bars and warehouses rather than the more middle-class safety that squatted further up the hills. I rarely felt alone here, amongst the constant activity and noise. Boarding school life is like that too; there is always another child stirring a few feet away, although you are never to touch.

  I drank the entire bottle. The view softened and the lights dimmed.

  I thought about the two castaways, thoughts that led me to compare my own life to theirs. I almost envied them, for I knew enough about my history to know I knew almost nothing. Perhaps better to know absolutely nothing, I thought, then anything was possible. It never occurred to me that anyone would knowingly will his or her life away.

  No one stirred, even in the waterfront bars. I sat staring, slumped in my chair as the night’s quiet folded me up and tucked me in. I must have fallen asleep, or passed out, for I came to hearing a cheery bird whistle, belling incongruously in the dark. Dawn was not far away.

  I rose from the chair and stumbled to my bedroom, a rudderless vessel. The bed span as I fell into it and burrowed beneath the covers, but even as part of my brain remarked on the spinning, unconsciousness dragged me under, like sliding into warm mud.

  I know I dreamt in those few hours of sleep, strange images that whisked around a corner as soon as I tried to recognise them. I wallowed in my sleep mud, my mouth filling with the ooze and slippage of the day, worries like grit between my teeth. Through the thick of it I felt my body twist and turn, my toes curled, fearful of findi
ng the bottom of this dream hole. No light penetrated my silt-layered lashes; I struggled in vain to open my eyes, each tiny muscle twitch causing earthquake rolls that flooded thickly into my ears and filled my throat. I heard my voice coming from a place that sounded outside my body, and fought with my hands to push through the mud to the surface.

  DAY THREE

  In the middle of this dreaming I awoke. My head beat and my heart ached. The sun dripped from a chink in the curtains to a pool on the floor of my room. I tipped myself out of the bed, feeling like a load of rocks with a roar in my head. I was an hour late.

  I showered and dressed quickly, no breakfast, and slammed out the front door. The enforced jog to work had me heaving on the side of the road, beneath the sparse shade of a palm tree in front of my office building, worried someone might see me this way. I looked out to the sea, which cut back at me, a bed of diamonds against my glassy stare. Sweat dribbled slowly from my armpits. I had never been late before.

  As I stumbled in, my distress seemed to please my boss.

  ‘Well,’ she exclaimed, tucking a slim file beneath her linen-clad arm. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  In mock consternation she checked her wristwatch against the office clock.

  ‘Could this tardiness be due to some youthful excess of spirits last night?’ She arched an eyebrow at me, not unkindly, to be fair. At my obvious lack of comprehension she smiled and shrugged. ‘Didn’t think so.’

  I couldn’t speak. My stomach was churning and I realised that throwing up all over my boss might distract her, but probably wouldn’t impress her. The strangest thing was that I debated this quite seriously with myself as I struggled to hold the bile down. She looked closely at my face.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Her tone was softened and I could have cried. I knew I was not her favourite employee, despite being her most diligent.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I lied.

  ‘You don’t look it,’ she said, grinning wolfishly at me. ‘Well, that’s your business. Now, how’re those two … castaways they picked up the other day? Are you getting anywhere?’

  I tried to fold my tongue around some words. My mouth tasted foul. She waited, arms folded, rings glinting on manicured fingers.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘They’re fine.’

  ‘Where are they from?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘Their names?’

  ‘That either.’

  ‘Not even that? Are they cooperating? Because if they’re not—’

  ‘Yes, yes they are,’ I said. ‘It’s just that they are disorientated, confused.’

  ‘Oh.’ To her, confusion was an alien emotion.

  ‘And there’s the language problem,’ I lied again. ‘Communicating is difficult.’

  I flushed, surprised at how effortlessly I had lied, fearful she would see through me. However, I need not have worried; my boss was not fluent in any tongue but her own – but with that she could bind and gag anyone she chose – so she accepted what I said.

  ‘Has the doctor seen them?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, yesterday. Medically they are well, just suffering from exposure, as one would expect. I thought, maybe …’ I stumbled, reluctant to reveal what I thought, fearing that the couple might be removed from my care if I did. It seemed so important to me that I solve their mystery, I thought, no one else would understand them.

  ‘Maybe what?’

  ‘Maybe it’s psychological. Maybe a psychologist would be—’

  ‘Out of the question,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t justify the expenditure.’

  She frowned, looking past me out to sea. My head was sore, but my conscience was clear; I had offered, she had rejected.

  ‘So what do they remember?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  That brought her gaze back.

  ‘Nothing at all?’ She sounded incredulous.

  ‘Dreams – they remember dreams.’

  ‘Good grief, girl, this is a government office – we have no use for people’s dreams.’

  She thrust the file she was carrying into my hands.

  ‘Well, you’d better have this then. It’s just the forms I usually fill in – you do it this time.’

  And with that she handed me the entire case.

  ‘Keep me posted,’ was all she said, in a tone that meant ‘disturb me at your own risk’, and she disappeared into the labyrinth of corridors that was our office building. A trail of perfume wafted in her wake, turning my stomach again. But I was happy; they were mine.

  ‘Tell me what you have remembered.’

  The castaways sat side by side on hard wooden government chairs. Two security guards escorted them to me each morning, then left us alone as they did not consider two old people a security risk.

  He sprawled, filling the chair, his long legs stretched out in front of him like gangways. His hair was thick and grey, his eyebrows the same, bushy outcrops leaning perilously over a cliff of a nose, the drop less fearful for the large, soft mouth that curved below. I could not imagine this man angry, but supposed that, as with many quiet men, stirring him to anger would be like summoning a cyclone. Those parts of his face not hidden beneath his beard were etched with lines that told of a life spent outdoors. His hands and feet were huge but in no way clumsy, more like big boats, cumbersome until they hit the water, where they floated peacefully with grace and strength. For all his distance, I felt drawn to him.

  She was different, perched on her chair as if about to take flight, toes tapping on the cool grey floor with a click-clack sound. At my question she stopped her tapping.

  ‘I remember nothing.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  She shook her head, sending a nest of feather-hair flying. He looked away to another horizon. The tapping started up again.

  ‘Why would I suddenly remember?’ she demanded.

  ‘I don’t know. Yesterday … I think we made progress. Another night, more rest. Sleep is a great cure they say,’ said I, thinking of my own lack of sleep.

  ‘Who say?’ she demanded, her chin lifted mockingly, her eyes twinkling. She knew she was being difficult, but it seemed to amuse her.

  Although the nausea had gone, my head still hurt and I did not feel up to arguing with her, so I looked down at my papers until she dropped her stance. She brushed back her hair.

  ‘I dreamt,’ she said, by way of apology, offered to me like someone would throw out an old dress.

  ‘Was it relevant?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘Tell me then.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It was awful.’

  ‘Was it that bad? It was only a dream.’

  ‘She woke me with her screams,’ the man interrupted, speaking for the first time since the morning greeting. He leant forward, both hands grasping the edge of my desk as if about to pull it closer to make me listen.

  ‘I followed her cries through the corridors. The moon was bright last night. They had locked her in.’

  ‘That’s not unusual – you are in a security building. How did you get in?’

  ‘The lock was not difficult to open.’

  Nor his, it would seem.

  ‘You need not have come – it was only a nightmare. I would have woken,’ she snapped.

  ‘But I came. Nightmares are often worse when awake.’

  ‘I did not ask for you to.’

  ‘I’m surprised they don’t keep you together,’ I said, interrupting the bickering, refraining from commenting on his admission to breaking out of his room and into hers.

  ‘Why?’ she said. ‘We are strangers.’

  ‘So tell me your dream,’ I asked again.

  ‘No.’

  ‘They say that if you tell your nightmare, it won’t come true,’ I said, cajoling her as one would a child. This was an old dormitory truth. I had heard the bad dreams of so many of my classmates, told in the cold of the night, and seen them vanish into nothing in
the sunlight of the next day.

  ‘Some nightmares are too real,’ said the woman, shuddering.

  ‘And some are real,’ he added. He stood and wandered to the window, where he ran his finger over the dusty sill; it came away dark, gritty. ‘Then you wish for dreams to come and take the real thing away.’

  He wiped his finger absentmindedly across his chest, leaving a dark smear on the light cream cotton shirt he had been given to wear.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I was in a war once. I think. Maybe it too was a dream; I hope so. Shall I tell you?’

  He offered it up to me in so casual a manner that it crossed my mind he was only telling me to draw attention from the woman; or making it up. I nodded.

  ‘We were in the desert,’ he began. ‘It was cold at night, so cold. And we were riddled with fleas and lice: our clothes, hair, blankets. We bathed once a week if lucky and drank bad gin whenever we could, as much as we could. The days were hot. The sun hung over us like a vulture, so hard and burning it could make your eyes bleed. During the day we walked – war at a walking pace,’ he laughed mirthlessly.

  ‘Even under fire we walked, or crawled. From hole to hole, trench to trench, digging ourselves in. Ostriches, that’s what we were. Walking and walking and pecking about and sticking our heads in the ground when danger loomed.’ He shook his head, like he had water caught in his ears.

  ‘There were stars there too, just like at sea; a huge sky full of beauty over waves of black sand. So black … except when the guns started and then the sky would be lit, brighter than day. The stars disappeared and I’d see men like me, cowering in holes like me, blind worms, maggots, burrowing from the light, from what might drop from the skies and destroy them. Then black again. Absolutely black, like nothing had ever existed.’

  His mind was far away. ‘So much was black: the sky, the desert, our boots, our hands, faces, the bodies of men hit. Charred. But that wasn’t the worst thing about them. The worst thing about them were the contortions – men who looked like they’d died trying to wrestle death. I used to wait in my hole and pray that when death came to me I would simply lie still and accept it. I wanted death to be like a black fog, sliding into my body and enveloping me, choking me gently.’