The Ghosts of Eden

by Andrew JH Sharp

  ‘Ah, excellent, sir.’

  ‘Right, well, I’ll take it then.’

  The price was the equivalent of a year’s earnings from operating at the Bexworth Private Clinic. He did not hesitate.

  Fourteen

  Michael saw Felice looking for him in the wrong direction over the chairs and tables of the hotel’s garden café beside the Indian Ocean. He leapt up and hurried over to her, the rest of the world falling away. Ahead of him he saw his oasis, his infinite light, his bejewelled city. She wore a red silk tube-top and the long twists of her hair extensions – a new style – coiled about her bare shoulders as she turned towards him. He vowed in that moment not to leave Dar es Salaam without her.

  He stopped a couple of steps away from her. He could not speak, only look at her. She seemed as tongue-tied as he. Stepping forward to close the space between them he raised a hand to cup her shoulder but let it fall back, as if it would be to touch a woman for the first time, as if in trepidation of the emotions it would evoke. He moved to kiss her on the cheek but then thought it inappropriate to her culture. She started to turn her face to accept him but then checked herself and proffered her hand instead, wrist set a little crooked. She looked down, as if overwhelmed and shy, as he took her hand with the lightest of touches.

  He spoke her name and for a moment she let the weight of her hand rest in his palm. He said, ‘You’re more beautiful than ever.’

  She looked back at him, a flashing connection between them. Then it was gone. She turned quickly, abashed or confused; he could not judge.

  Michael showed her to his table, pulled out her chair, waited for her to adjust it and then sat opposite, folding his sunglasses and placing them down in front of him. She held her own hands in her lap. The waiter had seen them take their seats and hurried over to take their orders.

  Felice smiled fleetingly when he said, ‘Indulge yourself: I’m a big chief with many cattle.’ She ordered water.

  As soon as the waiter had gone she spoke quietly, so that Michael had to lean forward a little to hear. ‘I’ve something important to tell you straight away.’

  ‘That’s why I’m here – to listen, to talk.’ He saw her throat move but she delayed. ‘Go on. There’s nothing that can matter between us.’

  ‘I’m engaged to be married again.’

  He withdrew his hands. He tried to speak, but failed.

  ‘Michael?’ she said, timidly.

  ‘I . . .’ he said eventually, and lapsed into a long silence.

  ‘Michael?’ she said again. She twisted and squeezed her fingers. He noticed her ring – an elaborate affair stuck with coloured stones. Even in his shock he found himself thinking they didn’t look right on her.

  He felt a flush of anger. ‘Perhaps you could have told me before I left. I didn’t pretend to come for a conference this time. It was at your invitation.’

  She looked uncomfortable, but said in a soft but resolute voice, ‘I wanted to explain to you why I’m unable to return your love.’

  The hot air became viscid. Michael could hardly draw breath to say, ‘Where’s your fiancé?’

  ‘He’s had to go to Kampala.’

  He sat silent again, before asking, ‘Who’s the luckiest man in the world?’

  She shifted a little in her chair. ‘It’s our custom to marry a close relative of the deceased husband.’

  He knew it. Kabutiiti, the lucky devil. Now a savage wish gripped him: that Zachye had succeeded in eliminating Kabutiiti. If only it was he that had been born Stanley’s relative; perhaps blood brotherhood would have been enough. He had got sufficiently spattered with Stanley’s blood to claim it as a ceremony.

  He asked, ‘Haven’t you put your incestuous traditions before your religion?’

  She flinched, but then said with conviction, ‘They’re not incompatible.’

  ‘So – you’re to marry Kabutiiti?’

  ‘No, Kabutiiti has an American girlfriend. The custom is to marry the husband’s brother. I’m to marry Zachye.’

  He stared at her. ‘Zachye?’

  She did not repeat it. His chest felt constricted. He stood up, knocking his chair over behind him, and walked fast to the edge of the paving. He paced to and fro beside the monstrous sisal leaves in the border – their barbarous thorns. He fought to understand what trickery, what cultural bondage, would lead a woman like Felice to agree to shackle herself to a man like Zachye. It was plain now: he understood nothing about her; only that she was unpredictable. The mid-morning sun roasted his scalp. His eyes smarted from the glare off the paving.

  A waiter picked up Michael’s chair, casting apprehensive glances at him. Felice had not moved. Their table was under a mango tree; he remembered how he had first met her under another tree, and how it had seemed back then that she might be inviting him to enjoy its fruits. Now she was casting him out: the fiery sword of her new marriage would bar his return forever. Her marriage to the devil.

  When he sat down again he saw that her eyes welled with tears. He knew it would make no difference.

  He put on his sunglasses. ‘I thought Zachye was safely in jail.’

  Felice said nothing.

  ‘I thought he’d been arrested for the armed robbery of Kabutiiti’s house.’

  She regained her voice. ‘Kabutiiti refused to press charges. After that Zachye came back to us.’ Michael gave a sceptical look. ‘He who’s forgiven much loves much.’ Her voice had strengthened, but held no emotion.

  ‘But you’re to marry Zachye, of all people, over the man who loves you!’

  ‘Yes . . . Zachye’s no longer as you remember him.’

  He could see that she was ready to come to Zachye’s defence. Could Zachye have changed so much? A Damascus-road-type turnaround?

  ‘I find that hard to believe. Do you love him?’ he asked.

  She did not respond immediately. ‘Does that matter to you?’

  Michael nodded.

  ‘Love can grow. He’s an honourable man now. He’s received forgiveness and he’s grateful.’

  ‘So he should be.’

  The waiter brought their drinks. Michael’s Tropical Sundae Surprise looked ludicrous. The celebration had become a wake. He tried to imagine what it was in Zachye that made Felice feel that she might grow to love him. An extraordinary wit? A little boy lost?

  She said in a rush, ‘You may hear him on the radio; he plays music. Everyone’s playing him. The media have discovered him.’

  Michael tried to picture Zachye on a stage, but found himself transported back to the noisy bars near the brothel on the night he had returned from Lwesala to Kampala – those blaring radios.

  ‘He’s developed his own style of Congolese soukous,’ she added, her voice fading at the end.

  There was a stifling silence, during which Felice studied her untouched glass of water and Michael bowed his head and closed his eyes. When the waiter returned and asked if they wanted to eat, Michael waved him away. He steeled himself then, siphoned in the humid air and prepared himself to take his leave. A sudden intense tenderness welled. He had to make this easy for her; he had to find it in himself to allow her the dignity of a courteous parting.

  ‘You’re happy?’

  She had not yet lifted her glass. ‘I’m peaceful.’

  He thought he should say he was pleased about that and he wished her well, but changed his mind. ‘I think that might not be true, Felice. You’re upset. I hate to see that. Is there anything else?’

  She glanced anxiously at him as if aware their time together was closing down. ‘It’s . . . you and me . . .’

  He saw something in her eyes then that he had not seen plainly before: bewilderment, hurt and the weight of a dilemma. And he saw that she loved him, and he was stricken – they shared the same pain, were trying to reach each other over an unbridgeable gulf. And some beast was in the gulf, which Felice could see and he could not.

  ‘What made you change your mind in Nairobi?’

  She let o
ut a retained breath. ‘If only . . . why did you reject the ways of your parents?’

  ‘My parents?’

  ‘Yes. I knew them well – your mother.’

  ‘You knew her?’ He scanned his childhood and remembered the Bible classes on the sisal mat in his childhood home. A room full of eager schoolgirls, captivated by his mother.

  ‘Yes, your mother. I loved her, and your grandfather – he was revered. We’re not blind to motives, us Africans. Aid workers, expatriates, religious people, business people; they all have their reasons. We can distinguish.’

  He tried to recall Felice as a child but he had not taken much notice of his mother’s Bible class girls.

  ‘Then why did you never tell me you knew my parents?’ he asked, slumping back in his chair.

  ‘Because I only found out the day before you came to Nairobi for your conference. Your sister told me that you’d cut yourself off from her after your parents’ death. She said you’d thrown away everything to do with your childhood.’

  ‘This gets worse! You know my sister?’

  ‘Of course. Rachel. From those days when she sat with us in your mother’s home – sometimes she sat on my lap. We’ve corresponded occasionally. But it was only when I wrote and mentioned I was to meet you – a surgeon called Michael that I’d got to know – that she put two and two together.’

  Michael wanted to wet his lips on his drink but Felice had pinned him down with a hard eye.

  ‘Your sister!’ She shook her head once. ‘Your own sister. She grieves for you.’ He was taken aback by her anger. ‘I found that cruel: that a man could become so hard. For me, Michael, loyalty to family is everything. As an African, I am not alone in believing that. That’s why I didn’t want to know you any more.’

  Michael was sickened by the way Felice presented it. He nodded – to accept her verdict. Then he sighed, liberated, for a burden of secrecy had been lifted. He wanted to tell her everything. To expose his withered soul.

  ‘Perhaps I should try to explain – although it’s far too late.’ Her face was still set in anger but she indicated with a small nod of her head that he should continue. He took a quick sip of his drink, and made himself remember. ‘Both my parents were killed on the road as they returned home from dropping me at the railway station on my way to school. Died in that bloody Anglia. I might add that they would have asked God for protection before their journey: it was their trusting habit.’ He paused to take a deep breath. ‘This I learnt within twenty-four hours of the death of my best friend, Simon.’

  ‘I didn’t know about your friend.’

  ‘Simon and I fell out of the window of the train on that same journey – an accident in retrospect, although I was to some degree culpable: there was a moment when I wished him dead, when I might have saved him. We both went through the window; except that I got a grip on the sill and hung there until rescued, knowing that Simon must be dead beside the tracks. I blamed myself without reservation at the time.’

  He looked stony-faced at his Tropical Sundae Surprise.

  ‘After that I had to come to terms with four deaths – my parents, Simon’s and God’s. The first three bereavements would’ve been bad enough, but the death of God – well – let’s just say that I was a very trusting child. I was a clay pot crushed.’

  He cleared his throat, picked the garish paper adornments from his drink, dropped them onto the table and took a large draught. Felice waited for him to go on, looking fully at him now, eyes dry.

  ‘My sister and I went to live with my father’s elderly aunt near Birmingham. She tried her best, but she was unable to do much more than provide shelter, food and clothing. She was out of her depth, handling two psychologically stunned children. We were sent to different boarding schools. I was on my own.

  He stopped to control himself. Felice sat patiently.

  ‘Since I’d been left on my own I decided to stand on my own; to erase Michael the child. I even considered changing my name.’

  Felice nodded slowly.

  ‘I buried the child, left him in the African soil. I disowned everything I’d ever been taught and believed. The fairy tales. I was no longer the missionaries’ child. Jesus was no longer a friend, just a swear word. I became someone else. Sounds impossible, but it’s not. A man can reinvent himself, make a resolution to forget his past, never talk about it and never think about it except in his bad dreams: look at Holocaust survivors, or Nazis after the war.’

  He stared out to sea. The horizon looked like the edge of the world; there was a just-visible agitation of the water at the lip, a line of spume; he could imagine the plunge into an emptiness so great that the falling water soon became foam, and then mist, and then vanished. He could see himself swimming out to the lip.

  Felice eventually said, ‘But you became successful. A surgeon.’

  ‘I remade myself. I went for achievement, and satisfaction in doing a job well. Maybe I helped a few people along the way.’ He signalled with a puckering of his cheeks and an out-turning of his hands that he had told her his story.

  ‘But you returned to Uganda.’

  ‘Yes, to the conference. When I accepted the invitation I was sure the past couldn’t reach me – but maybe I was looking for something as well. I’d lost Michael of my own volition, but nevertheless it was a fifth bereavement. Perhaps I thought the child was out here somewhere.’ He found himself remembering that claustrophobic aisle in the medical school library where he had browsed for insights into Felice’s loss, memorising a paragraph here, a sentence there; how he had become distracted by a chapter on childhood bereavement: ‘Our sense of self, our identity, is largely dependent on the internal narrative that we construct about our lives. We are capable of reformulating the story to accommodate unexpected and difficult events, but an overwhelming trauma may remain unstoried. A child may be unable to integrate the event into their narrative, they suffer dissociation, their sense of self becomes dislocated . . .’

  He tried to stab the cherry in his glass with a cocktail stick but it bobbed away from him. ‘Here in Africa I started seeing malign spirits. A vacuum in me – call it spiritual if you want – sucked in malevolent ghosts. Deaths, feathers, fetishes took on sinister meanings. Then I met you. I suppose you represented something of my family to me – I must have sensed it in you: the hidden connection. Of course, there’s much more: you’re a beautiful woman – and the first I truly loved. The first I felt I could tell my story to. Too late.’ Felice looked down at her hands. ‘Then you rejected me. Other things happened, and I had a breakdown.’

  He waited for her to say something but she was burying her ring hand in the other, gripping it tightly. ‘I know you believe we have something called a soul, Felice. I did look a little myself for some sort of spirituality in . . . take-it-or-leave-it vagaries.’ He gave a forced laugh. ‘While you Africans have gone from animism to Christianity – at least three hundred million of you, I read somewhere – we Europeans have gone from Christianity to animism: reading horoscopes, appeasing demons of poor health, or neurosis, with our shaman-psychoanalysts, worshipping spirits in machines, ascribing to nature magical powers in force lines and energies. Despite our science.’

  ‘But your flesh and blood – your own sister!’

  Michael almost smiled, the way she refused to be distracted from the important. She might have added what Simon had said, with unwitting insight, on that fateful railway platform to his mother: It’s about love.

  He said, ‘Rachel grew up saintly. She reminded me of all I wished to forget. I couldn’t bear it.’ He tried not to think of his sister. He might blub, as the child Michael would have said. ‘I made the wrong decision. I reacted the wrong way, Felice. But I was overwhelmed by what had happened to me. I was just a child.’

  She nodded slowly, sadly, and said, ‘I understand better now.’

  ‘I never stood a chance: your customs, your traditional ways.’

  She looked pained. ‘Maybe you should be like us Africa
ns and listen to your ancestors.’

  He sighed. ‘There’d be no progress if . . .’

  But Felice talked over him as if she could see it all now. ‘You’ve uprooted yourself from the soil you grew in, Michael. You’ve cut yourself off from your inheritance.’

  ‘Inheritance?’

  She nodded. ‘Your inheritance of love. Now you’re all dried up.’

  The sapping heat seemed to confirm her.

  ‘I was a quirky, unusually pious child, Felice. Too trusting. I wouldn’t want to go back.’

  ‘You didn’t have to go back to a child’s understanding. You could have budded in other ways, out of the soil you found yourself in. You could have taken strength from your ancestors, learnt something from them even if you wished to make a different life, become a different tree.’

  He felt a plea in her analysis, but for what purpose? ‘If I’m such a detestable man, and I can appreciate why you judged me so, then why did you want to see me again?’

  She leant a little towards him, a coil of her hair falling off her shoulder. ‘Michael, I . . .’ She hesitated, snatched a breath and said in a rush, ‘I wanted to apologise for my behaviour when we last met, and to tell you about me and Zachye.’

  ‘You could’ve done all that in a letter.’ He spoke wearily.

  Felice unclasped her hands, lifting them from her lap, and placed them on the table so that her fingertips were not far from his. He saw her new ring again, but she had raised her eyes to his. ‘I wanted to see you, Michael. Face to face.’ He returned her gaze. She did not look away. ‘I just wanted to see you. It’s very selfish and . . . it will damn us both.’ The tears came again but this time ran unchecked.

  He was swept by currents of pain. ‘I thought you considered me to be . . . just out to flatter you.’

  She composed herself. ‘Sorry – these indulgent tears. You did flatter me when we first met, but I thirsted for it. You must understand that Stanley was a fine man, I loved him, but he didn’t always demonstrate his love for me in ways I needed. So when you showed me such appreciation, made it easy to laugh, and . . . OK, I wanted to be held,’ she cast him a colluding look. ‘It was hard to remain faithful. But then when my time with Stanley came to an end . . . I can’t deny it, my heart was drawn, Michael.’