The Ghosts of Eden

by Andrew JH Sharp

  ‘No, but then we’re not talking much at present. I’m hard going again.’

  ‘Unfortunately the man was an impostor. James was going to make a gift into the account and I wanted to warn him off.’

  ‘That’s typical of James. He’s generous, but gullible. I’ll let him know.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Were you ringing for any other reason? You sounded a bit anxious earlier.’

  ‘No – just that.’

  ‘You’ve put Felice out of your mind I hope?’

  ‘Well, I would like to know whether she’s all right.’

  ‘Kabutiiti said she’s coping well.’

  ‘Good. Umm …’

  ‘Did you say something?’ Audrey asked.

  ‘I do think about her.’

  ‘I thought you might. Forget about her, Michael. Find someone from your own culture. So much less complicated. It’s not just your different backgrounds, you know. Felice is steeped in her spiritual world – most Africans are – you can’t begin to understand her unless you recognise that. You’ll never be soul mates; you’re oil and water, Michael, and I’m not making a judgement on you at all.’

  Despite Audrey’s reassurance, Michael felt a little stung. He said, ‘I had exposure to the religious views that Felice holds when I was a child. I do understand it.’ It was the first time that he had admitted that aspect of his childhood to anyone. He wondered if Audrey knew anyway through her – what was it? – clairvoyant powers or, more likely, her sharp intuition.

  ‘No, I don’t think you do. She doesn’t have views, as you call them. That implies the holding of an opinion: looking out through a shade of glass that one holds up oneself. What Felice has is far deeper: it’s something projected out; she emanates it, radiates it.

  He thanked her for her advice and sent his regards to James. When he put down the phone he considered Audrey’s words carefully. If he deeply loved Felice, should he not learn to swim in the same sea? The sea of faith. For her sake. Others had done more: some slain dragons, embarked on impossible quests, the biblical Jacob had worked as a slave for fourteen years to win Rachel. He sighed; faith seemed to be something given rather than self-generated, and he could not make himself believe, could not conjure up visions, feel religious. For the first time he feared that he was not the right man for Felice. That he might taint her in saving himself. Even destroy her.

  Twelve

  Dear Michael,

  I wished to write again to say how kind you were in writing to me so often in the early months of my loss. It was a help to me. I have been less than courteous in only writing back once, but grief did strange things to time. The weeks and their happenings fell haphazardly – in no particular order, or sometimes all at once. Now my orientation is restored and I have started to look to the future again.

  I hope your work is going well, you sound as busy as Stanley always was. Find time to relax.

  As for myself, I have had to make many decisions as to what to do next. There is no doctor yet to replace Stanley at Lwesala although the Central African Fellowship may send a retired general practitioner from the UK to help as a stopgap. Regrettably I am not qualified to take Stanley’s place.

  Michael looked up from the page. Would he go and work at Lwesala if that was what it would take to win Felice? Could love exist divorced from the world in which it found itself?

  ‘My big news is . . .’, he turned the page to read on, his heart missing a beat, ‘. . . that I am to study for a Masters in Pharmacology in Nairobi – thanks to the generosity of Kabutiiti, although I have not seen him for a long time. He is in New York as a VIP! I start in six weeks.’

  He bounded upstairs to his office and searched along his neatly indexed files. He pulled out the Proceedings of the Twelfth Conference of the Lake Regions Surgical Association. There it was: ‘Minutes of the Committee’. Second last item in the minutes. ‘The next annual conference will be held in Nairobi from the . . .’

  ‘Four months’ time!’

  She finished her letter warmly, hoping that they would be able to meet again.

  Michael placed the letter on the shelf above the desk, sniffing it before he folded it in case a trace of her perfume had lingered, trapped in the creases. He touched the stamp – she would have licked it. I’ve gone crazy, he thought: emotions out of control; dangerous. But he didn’t care.

  He wrote back immediately to say that, by happy coincidence, he was attending the surgeons’ conference again, that it happened to be in Nairobi, and would she like to meet?

  Until she replied the objective of his days was to reach the moment when he got home to look through his post. He woke one night in a sweat, seeing Zachye – about thirty feet tall and a bush fire behind him – on his way to find Felice. To whisper a lie. To destroy his future. He tried to run after him but Zachye’s long legs made his own efforts hopeless. At the brothel he got on the bus to get to Felice more quickly but Zachye leant down, removed the keys and threw them over the Rwenzori Mountains. Zachye bent down again before he disappeared towards Lwesala and whispered in Michael’s ear, ‘I loved her before you did.’

  He could not get back to sleep. By dawn he had decided that he must take a necessary precaution: to start a small monthly deposit into Zachye’s ‘charity’ account to ensure that Zachye kept his mouth shut. These were critical times. It was a fraction of what Zachye had demanded – just enough, he hoped, to prevent him spreading rumours, and if it ever came to light he felt some justification in claiming that he feared Zachye would threaten Felice, or the other witness, unless he paid up. He could not go to the police because of Stanley’s last wish, which he felt honour-bound to keep. A practical and logical case – and it would, ultimately, be for Felice’s sake.

  He did not have to wait long for Felice’s reply to his request to see her in Nairobi. She would be delighted. After that Felice wrote regularly – an increasingly relaxed correspondence that replicated, as far as it was possible by the written word, the bonhomie that they had established face to face before Stanley’s death. Her letters were long and detailed: her friends, her family, everyday events, small happenings. She picked up on the scraps of news in his own letters and asked for more: ‘Hope your secretary, June, is better soon . . . Did you enjoy your conference in Turin? I would like to see Italy one day . . . How was your registrar’s wedding? . . . You must be pleased with your new car.’

  Starting one of Felice’s letters, Michael’s eye was drawn down the page to Zachye’s name. She had written:

  I did not mention before now that Zachye failed to attend Stanley’s funeral. That will hardly surprise you until I tell you that our traditional beliefs compel us to attend the funeral of friend and enemy alike, or forever suffer the wicked attentions of the ghost of the deceased. So Zachye will be fearful, although I believe Stanley, even in death, would wish Zachye no harm. I pray I will one day be given the grace to feel the same about Zachye . . .

  I was thinking today about your invitation to me to come over to the UK. Is it too late to take up your offer? It would have to wait until I’ve finished my masters. Perhaps we can discuss it when I see you. I’m looking forward to that, Michael – very excited to think that I’ll see you again and laugh with you and have some fun. It seems as if it’s been a long time since I could really relax. I think back to when we talked by the fire in the Queen Elizabeth National Park. Please don’t forget your poems. I’d love to hear them again.

  In theatre one morning, while scrubbing up, Michael started humming ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’. His house officer, Jenny, glanced at him along the line of taps.

  ‘You’re happy this morning, Mr Lacey.’

  ‘I’m in love,’ he said, shocking himself with his unabashed reply.

  He saw Jenny cast an eye at the nurse behind him unwrapping the sterile gowns, and could imagine her mouth falling open in silent return of his house officer’s astonishment.

  ‘That’s nice. What’s she like?’ she dared to ask.


  ‘Beautiful of course – and bloody hard to catch.’

  ‘When’s the wedding then?’ the nurse said boldly.

  Michael re-established order. ‘What did you say earlier about the X-rays? They’ve not arrived in theatre yet?’

  The operation – a gastrectomy for stomach cancer – was technically challenging but his hands worked easily amongst the metal retractors, swabs, clips, suckers and the lines of thread which came up from the wound like the ordered cables of a suspension bridge.

  Doug, the Australian anaesthetist, was leaning over the towels at the head of the patient, watching him operate.

  ‘Haven’t you got anything to do up there, Doug?’ Michael asked.

  ‘I’m bored,’ Doug said, holding his half-tied mask (colourful with Disney characters) to his round face. ‘Nothing screws up in your theatre. I won’t mention your colleague, Mr Barnabas Smithy Smythe, by name, but with him I’m fighting to keep the patient alive while he carries out all sorts of bloody atrocities in the abdomen.’

  Michael heard the sniggering of the nurses. He would normally have stopped the banter at that point by his silence but he had released a tension and it felt cathartic. ‘It works both ways. With your fellow antipodean gasman, I have to hold down the patient with one hand while I operate single-handed with the other.’

  ‘No shit!’

  ‘Language please, Doctor,’ the theatre sister said. Michael thought that she looked like an eagle owl with her fiercely angled eyes and fixing stare. She reminded him of Auntie Beryl at his junior school.

  ‘The patient’s unconscious, no worries,’ boomed Doug, rotating his mask up so that the lower half now covered his eyes, prompting open laughter from the nurses but a disdainful snort from the theatre sister.

  The theatre became hushed once more. Felice came to Michael’s mind again. She was never far from him now, like an entwining silk: lightly running, an erotic charging, sometimes a cool teasing, always a tugging.

  He said, ‘Did you know that John Hunter, the seventeenth-century surgeon, said that Eve was indisputably black?’

  ‘What? Aboriginal?’ Doug asked.

  ‘Sure, African aboriginal.’

  ‘Well, I’m whomped! My nana would never believe that.’

  Jenny chipped in, ‘They’re going to find the Eve ancestor one day, if they keep digging for bones in Tanzania.’

  Michael pushed a little on the retractor that she pulled on, to remind her to concentrate on giving him full access to his field of operation, then said, ‘I’ve found my own black Eve already.’

  ‘Your Sheila’s aboriginal?’ Doug pulled his mask under his chin.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fuck me! Good on you, mate.’

  Michael smiled under his mask. Everything was going to turn out well.

  He felt nervous when he rang Felice’s number as soon he had dumped his suitcase on his bed in the New Stanley Hotel in Nairobi. The irony of its name was not lost on him – his private joke. Felice had told him that she was staying with family friends in the suburbs. There seemed to be too few digits in the number for a capital city. He feared that she had inadvertently given him an incorrect number.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Ah, hello.’

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Yes, hello. Could I speak to Felice Katura?

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello. Could I speak to Felice Katura?’

  ‘Whom do you wish to speak to?’

  ‘Mrs Katura. Felice Katura.’

  ‘Hello?’

  He assumed that the recipient of his call could either not hear him or could not understand him and so he reverted to a trick he had used on European holidays: to use any native word he happened to know to demonstrate just how futile it was for the recipient to attempt to communicate in anything but English.

  ‘Asante sana, Felice,’ he shouted down the mouthpiece.

  ‘She’s not in.’

  ‘When will she be in?’

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Please, is there anyone else I can talk to?’

  ‘Felice is not in.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘So why do you ring?’

  ‘Look! When will Felice be in?’

  ‘Maybe an hour.’

  ‘OK, thank you. Tell her Michael Lacey rang. I’ll phone back in an hour.’

  He unpacked, set his alarm, had a shower, lay on the bed pretending to read and then rang back five minutes before the alarm was due. His heart pounded as he waited; he wondered if Felice would be able to feel the throbbing down the line.

  The same voice answered. ‘Hello.’ He assumed she was the maid.

  ‘Yes, it’s me again. Mr Lacey. Is Mrs Katura back?’

  ‘She came back.’

  Michael smiled – at last. ‘Can I speak to her?’

  ‘It’s not possible.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘She’s gone away.’

  ‘What?’

  The maid repeated herself.

  ‘Did you tell her I rang and was going to ring back?’

  ‘I informed her.’

  ‘Well? What did she say?’

  ‘She said nothing. She went away.’

  ‘You told her that Mr Lacey rang?’

  ‘I informed her.’

  ‘Did she not ask me to ring back?’

  ‘She did not.’

  He lay that night, alone, knowing Felice was still far away, still on another continent.

  The university refectory was packed with students, and noise. He scanned the tables, working systematically from near to far. She was sitting with three other girls by a far window (the blinds half pulled down against the tropical sun), hardly distinguishable from the other students in her jeans and white blouse. As always, she wore her cowry shell earrings. He walked boldly to the table, catching the attention of a few students who followed his progress. He suspected they believed he was some tourist with a crush on a black girl he had met in a bar; or a foreign lecturer unaware that this was the students’ domain.

  She saw him coming, exclaiming, ‘Oh!’ so that her companions followed her gaze.

  ‘Felice, I’m sorry to surprise you.’ She had her hand across her heart. ‘Is there anywhere quiet we can talk?’ He waved a hand at the bright lawn outside with its honeysuckle hedge and low-boughed trees.

  She looked away from him at a point in the middle of the table. ‘I have a lecture in . . . ten minutes.’

  ‘Yes, she has a lecture now,’ said the girl sitting next to her, fast on the uptake.

  Michael looked steadily at Felice. She glanced up at him, her face set. He found he had stopped breathing, was perfectly still.

  She looked at the table again but he could see that she was wavering. Turning to her companions, she said, ‘Will you leave us alone for a few minutes?’

  The girls got up, scowled at Michael and leant against a wall nearby – watching.

  ‘Thank you,’ Michael said. He sat himself down opposite her. ‘You have young friends.’

  ‘Yes, I feel old.’

  ‘So do I,’ he replied.

  There was a silence. He waited for her to explain her sudden change of sentiment. It occurred to him that there were parallels in what was happening with those occasions when Naomi had wanted to understand him – but now the tables were turned: it was he who wanted to make sense of the woman.

  ‘Can I pour you some water?’ he asked.

  She nodded. The silence continued until he said quietly, ‘Felice, I’ve come a long way. Why do you not want to see me?’ He tried to look into her eyes but she was still looking down. Her long eyelashes curved seductively. ‘I love you.’

  He had not meant to say it. Not now.

  She bent forward a little, an involuntary spasm, as if she had been punched in the solar plexus.

  ‘Have I totally surprised you?’

  ‘Michael, I cannot.’ Still she would not look at him.

  He blurted, ‘What do you nee
d from me, Felice?’ What did she want most? He hesitated, and then said with as much tenderness as he could muster, ‘I’d like children too, you know.’

  She dropped her head, and he saw that she was fighting back tears. He wanted to reach out to her, but stayed cemented to his chair.

  ‘What’s wrong? Is it skin colour?’

  She made a small shake of her head.

  ‘Is it culture? My background is closer to yours than you think.’

  She sat herself up straight. ‘No – something has happened.’

  ‘I can see that.’ He leant towards her and opened out his hand. ‘So let’s not hide anything. Don’t they say love conquers all?’

  ‘Some love, yes.’

  He sensed her regaining her self-assurance; he feared what might be coming. He almost hoped that their conversation would end in an inconclusive state and leave room for hope: the very act of asking Felice to explain might confirm her in whatever contrary state she had fallen into. On the other hand surgical incisiveness demanded action: expose it, fix it.

  ‘Surely romantic love can do it? If that’s not strong enough what the hell is?’ He could not hide his welling exasperation. ‘Felice, do you have no feelings for me?’ He immediately regretted his outburst, and said gently, ‘Is there another man?’

  She seemed unable, or unwilling, to answer. Her jaw had hardened and she had fastened her gaze on the middle of the table again. He saw her friends start to move themselves off the wall.

  She looked up and fixed him with steely eyes. ‘Was it just flattery?’

  Now Michael felt he’d been punched. Anger and confusion rose together. A ten thousand mile round trip for this.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said. She picked up her handbag and took out a small mirror, but then put it back without using it.

  He became aware of the cross girlfriend squeezing past him to get to Felice. A kraal of feminine alliance was about to take her in.

  He leant forward and said urgently, ‘I’ll wait for you. The rest of my life, if necessary.’

  ‘Don’t,’ she said, her voice calm, resolved.

  Felice’s friend had put her arm around her shoulders, fixing an accusatory stare at Michael. The students at the next table were watching. He got up and left, side-stepping his way around students carrying their trays to the tables. A male student jostled him. ‘Get your prick out of Kenya, Muzungu.’