by Judy Croome
Hungry because she had given them the last of the food, and exhausted from cleaning and scrubbing and caring for them, the answer came to her one night as she tucked the children back into their beds. The Spirit King. The Spirit King was a good father—the Father of his people—and he would take care of them.
Early the next day she went to Prior Devin.
‘Let the children stay with me,’ he said. ‘Somewhere in the Earth Palace there must be a good holding camp. I’ll make sure the social welfare keeps them together.’ He drummed his fingers on his desk. ‘What about you? What will you do?’
‘I’ll manage,’ she said and clutched her pendant. He frowned, chewing his bottom lip. Abruptly, he pulled open a drawer and slapped a note pad on his desk. With a swirl of his chuba, he sat, took out his pen with the end chewed white, and scratched a long note, which he sealed in a thick brown envelope.
‘Go to the Old Sea City,’ he said, handing her the envelope. ‘My friend Prior Ajani at the Court of St Jerome will help you.’
Leaving her family without a backward glance, she beheld the vision offered by the Spirit King’s wounded face nailed to the nova, high above the school gate: the promise of a new life, a paradise.
Armed with her faith, the introductory letter from Prior Devin and a small bag of second-hand clothes, she escaped to the Old Sea City, which had nestled at the foot of the Dark Continent for centuries.
Arriving in the big city, far from her past, her devotion wavered when she saw its immensity, but her fealty in the Spirit King’s promise of a better life paid off for, on that same day, she met Dawud Templeton.
When she found Prior Ajani, her old prior’s friend, he stood under the shade of a giant bladdernut tree, a guardian at the gate leading into the Court of St Jerome, talking to a shrivelled old crone. He was a portly man of about sixty years of age, his thin white hair unruly and windblown. He took one look at her tired face and, before he’d even read her letter said, ‘You’ll be safe here, dear. I’ll take you to Granny Zahra Templeton; she’ll help you settle into the city.’
The affable Prior Ajani had packed her, and her small bag of clothes, into his battered green Fiat and driven her to a grandiose mansion, tucked away in a leafy suburb. High on the mountain, it had a scenic view of the ocean below and there, standing on the grand sweep of stairs beneath the high white gable, were two people.
One, formally dressed in a navy Chanel suit and low-heeled navy-and-white pumps despite the heat of the day, was an old woman, perhaps fifteen years older than the Prior. Upright and formidable, she was Zahra: matriarch of the prominent Templeton family, patroness of a host of charities and sponsor of Prior Ajani’s parish, the Court of St Jerome.
The other, a mousy-haired, good-looking young man, with soft brown eyes and a laughing mouth, was the old woman’s grandson, Dawud.
Dawud—Jamila’s other light, her other saviour—soon strengthened Jamila’s allegiance to the Spirit King and became the twin candle that lit her life with hope.
When her memories brought the dust of yesterday into her mouth, drying it with fear, she touched the pendant she wore around her neck, or she spoke to Dawud. The first, her old wooden pendant, comforted her. It told her that, in leaving her siblings and her past behind her, she had indeed surrendered her will to the Spirit King’s plan. The second, Dawud, was her reward for that surrender.
• • •
She wore her pendant until the day Dawud’s friend made her ashamed of it. Jamila, new to the city’s ways, was uncertain how to react when Daren Samanya lifted the triple string from its resting place. His hands brushed her skin and she shivered as he peered at the tiny face with its leopard skin coronet and faded coral bead.
‘What’s this?’ he asked.
She shifted, uneasy because she disliked the careful way his lips hugged his words and pulled her into her past even as he drew her closer, too close. ‘A n-n-necklace.’
‘It’s wood. On a plastic string!’ He laughed.
Then he tempted her.
He pressed her into the hardness of his body with drunken fervour and slid his other hand around her waist. ‘Give me a kiss and I’ll buy you a gold one, real gold.’
Jamila retreated into dignity. She was conscious—too conscious—of her mended underwear and the almost invisible patch in her best cotton dress where his hand clutched her waist.
‘Let me go. Please.’
‘You won’t miss one kiss, love.’
‘No!’ She thought of the Spirit King, who cleansed the temple of the ezomos with nothing but righteous anger and a whip. It gave her the strength to grind the sharp heel of her shoe into his foot.
‘Kuntus!’ He grunted and dropped his arms. ‘What did you do that for?’
She was steady and cool. ‘I asked you to let me go.’
‘What’s the big deal about a kiss?’ He grabbed another drink off the tray of a waiter who passed and hurled it down his throat. ‘We’re at a party!’
‘I’m with someone.’ Jamila searched for Dawud. She missed him. She wanted him near her, where she could see and touch him.
‘Who? I haven’t met you before.’ Daren stroked a finger down her cheek. He smelt of sweat and something else she couldn’t identify. She wanted to retch and jerked her face out of his reach. Her hand crept up to rub her talisman. The comfortable weight of the mask, its energy, its strength, eased her spirit.
‘I’m with Dawud Templeton.’ The pendant worked its magic. She sounded serene and calm, despite the panic fluttering inside.
He laughed, and threw his head back, his mouth so wide the row of gold fillings in his molars glittered with avaricious intent.
‘You’re Dawud’s Jamjar—the up-country girl! I heard him say Zahra’s latest charity case is a little beauty.’ His eyes, so unlike the soft brown of Dawud’s, touched her in places she’d never let any man touch her.
Not even Dawud. She already loved him and almost let him kiss her the previous night, but his grandmother, her face austere, had interrupted them.
Zahra Templeton frightened her. She watched Jamila all the time. Her gaze, as familiar in its intensity as the gazes of the people dropping their coins into her begging cup, told Jamila she wasn’t good enough. Beggar Sam’s daughter would always be a charity case.
The same glint was in Daren Samanya’s eyes.
Charity case. Charity case. Charity case.
Dawud loved her beyond the social ineptness and the mended clothes. She touched her necklace, and he loomed behind Daren. Her angel, her avenger. Her new beloved.
‘Unspoilt beauty is what I said, Dar.’
He handed Jamila her orange juice, and gave Daren a direct glower from under his brows, his mouth sterner than she’d ever seen it. He kept a possessive arm around her shoulder—not tall, yet so much taller than she, her head tucked under his arm and Jamila was safe.
‘I’d like her to stay that way, Dar.’
‘You’re not my keeper, Templeton,’ Samanya sneered, and disappeared into the darkness.
To Jamila, it was a revelation. When had a man ever taken care of her? After they left Daren and the party behind, she took Dawud into her room in Granny Zahra’s splendid mansion and, in the intense silence of a sacred ritual, she stripped off her clothes and offered herself to him. She tried not to care about the patches in her underwear, but Dawud, loving her as he did, knew how ashamed it made her.
The next day he bought her new underwear, and a new dress: expensive pale pink silk, with a demure round collar and a thin belt that pinched in her waist. As she packed her old clothes into the new shopping bag, she discreetly removed the little wooden Spirit King-mask on its three plastic strings. Unseen, she slipped it into her new purse and told herself she didn’t need it any more. She had Dawud. He was enough to keep her safe.
And she had no regrets. Not then.
Her ezomo had yet to find her.
• • •
Dawud changed everything. In a few short months, he
r life went from hopeless to hopeful. After he bought her that pink silk dress—after she gave her body to him as completely as she had once given her essence to the Spirit King—their love transformed her world.
Prior Ajani had given her a job in the Court office and, when she arrived each day, she worked on automatic, while her mind flew free with dreams.
She dreamt of the time when she would be Mrs Dawud Templeton. ‘Soon,’ Dawud always promised as he rolled over on his back and held her in his arms after they had loved. ‘We’ll marry soon.’
‘I believe you,’ she said, but heard Papa’s sly echo. I’ll find a job next week. You’ll never have to beg again. Your friends won’t laugh at you. Papa had broken too many promises and so, in the musty cupboard that held her quintessential self, she doubted. But her heart spoke: Dawud is different, it said, Dawud will save you.
And she believed.
• • •
Dawud worked hard in the pharmacies he inherited from his grandfather. In those early days, before he became domesticated and worried about The War, he played hard as well.
Some weeks they were out every night. They met with friends in restaurants: opulent, expensive and exclusive. They went to the theatre and saw plays with names that Jamila had seen on the covers of books she couldn’t afford to buy because all her money had to go to feed the younger children. They dressed in nautical clothes and spent the day on some friend’s yacht. They would sail around the bay and Jamila would hang over the rails and stare deeply into the mysteries of the ocean, wondering about the Age of the Great Flood and the waters that rose and rose. When the flood stopped, did a long-dead woman, like Jamila today, comprehend the miracles the Spirit King’s love had brought?
She thrived in her new life…until Daren Samanya returned.
‘So the Jamjar’s not so innocent anymore, is she?’ Two years later, she recognised the thread of dark amusement that shuddered down her spine and made her think of love and man, angels and ezomos.
Dawud’s friend, Daren Samanya, had found her.
‘You’ve moved in with Templeton,’ he said. ‘Have you developed a taste for city life yet? Have you, Jamjar?’
She took refuge in dignity. ‘I beg your pardon?’ She arranged her face in a pose of polite enquiry and turned to him. ‘Have we met?’
He laughed. A deep belly laugh that threw his head back, his eyes such a dark, seductive blue she found it hard to remember what colour Dawud’s eyes were. ‘Oh, you’re good, Jamjar. Ver-r-ry good! You’ve learnt a lot. What else have you learnt, I wonder?’
He observed her with cloudy purpose. Jamila clutched her glass, a pale spritzer, not enough wine to give the soda a kick, but enough to make her feel a sophisticated woman-of-the-world. She hadn’t liked this man when he first tried to kiss her. She did not like him now. He unsettled her in ways she couldn’t control. She shivered and the wine lapped the edge of her glass in a vague warning she didn’t heed.
She was more confident then. The thought of Dawud’s promise and a vision of the reputable, the acceptable, the grand Mrs Jamila Templeton she would become, made her bolder, she realised later, than she should have been. She flirted from behind the safety of her half-full wineglass. Letting her eyelids droop in insolent challenge, the way she’d seen other women do, she said, ‘You’re mistaken. I would have remembered you.’
She was delighted when his eyes heated with the same fire that warmed Dawud’s face at times. Except this man’s face carried a latent temptation that both lured and repelled her. But she was so enthralled by the power surging in her veins she ignored the danger. Soon he moved closer, and lifted another glass from the tray of an itinerant waiter. This wine tasted stronger and she wanted to ask him to put soda in to weaken it, but she didn’t want to be gauche, so she left it, taking a discreet sip again and again until the glass was empty.
Then they were outside—and years later, as a restless Jamila lay on a bed covered with a white comforter in Daren Samanya’s house, she would fling an arm over her face to block out the memories, but it was too late, they were indelible—and she was back with Samanya leading her outside.
‘The moon is incredible,’ he said, and it was.
The full moon shone over them and turned the world silvery surreal. Jamila drank in the sight even as she drank from her wine glass. The mellow air, the silence of the night, trickled into her blood with the alcohol. When Samanya bent his head and touched his lips to her neck, she sighed and raised a hand to stroke his cheek to see if it was silky golden as it looked.
Samanya turned her into his embrace. He kissed her lips, her breasts, her secret place the night air cooled even as his lips set it aflame. Soon, Jamila shuddered out a release as Samanya moved between her legs and showed her paradise.
‘Why?’ she sobbed later. She leaned back into the low balcony wall and held her pale pink sweater, another gift from Dawud, against her nudity. She never wore pink again, not after that night. ‘Why couldn’t you leave me alone?’
Samanya riffled through her bag and took a tissue. He wiped himself clean. ‘You were too innocent, Jamjar,’ he jeered. He laughed a sunless laugh that almost, but not quite, drowned out the rasp of his zipper jerked back into place and dropped the soiled tissue into her lap. ‘Much too innocent.’
Where once there was a warm flicker of hope in all that the city offered her, the extent of its insidious underbelly chilled her. ‘You’re horrible! Horrible!’ She longed for Dawud to save her from the nightmare. He was not there and, unprompted by any thought, her hand searched for her pendant, her Spirit King-mask, to give her strength, to cover her shame revealed by the brilliant, merciless gaze of moon and man. But she had stopped wearing it when Dawud had bought her the real gold necklace she’d asked for.
Samanya laughed and coolly tucked in his shirt that, in the heat of ecstasy, she’d torn lose from his trousers. He said, as he left her, ‘Whatever I am, Jamjar, you’re the same.’ He looked at her with remorseless calm and added, ‘Because you could’ve said no anytime.’
And there—right there, where the moon’s light rippled across the dark waters of the silent sea—Jamila accepted that she had found her passion and kissed the face of her ezomo.
Chapter 6
Zahra (The Past)
“I will not choose what many men desire,
Because I will not jump with common spirits
and rank me with the barbarous multitudes.”
For days after the stranger’s visit, I found no peace.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Barry asked. He was not used to me quiet. Normally we discussed how to expand the family business or what to do with the multitude of staff who worked in the mansion.
‘What could be wrong?’ I flipped another page. A stupid book, although the newspaper reviews declared it as a recent literary success. Reading was a chore. With the same discipline I used to practise my elocution and every gesture I made, I forced myself to complete the task, for I could not risk Little Flower finding a crack in my memories.
The pages didn’t hold my attention. Who cared about Hemingway’s old man and a boy, his faith and a fish? Or even sacrifices and the sea? I didn’t, but at least I’d be able to talk about it at the next dinner party we attended.
There never was much time for reading when I was young. We moved too often, living out of suitcases barely big enough to hold our clothes, let alone books having little to do with survival in a world where the weak perished and the strong endured. I never joined a library. I had my natural intelligence, and I managed. Little Flower did well by herself in those early days.
‘There is something wrong,’ Barry insisted when I said no more.
I roused enough energy to give him my cool look, the one that warned others not to step past the boundaries I set.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m fine.’
He wanted to argue, but I held his gaze until he left the comfort of his old velvet armchair to open a window.
‘I saw Mother tod
ay,’ he said. ‘She’s well.’
‘Umm.’ I turned another page.
‘Her visitor is good for her.’
I tensed and, even though I knew of whom he spoke, I asked, ‘Her visitor?’
‘Enoch. That fellow we met last week.’
‘Oh.’ A rapid flick feigned an interest in the pages I read. ‘Him.’ I shivered.
Barry never heard nuances. ‘I liked him.’ His head bobbed in emphasis and he used a short, stubby finger to push his heavy tortoiseshell spectacles back up his nose. ‘Yes, I liked him a lot.’
‘He doesn’t belong.’
Keeping my eyes on the page, I shifted into a more comfortable position, crossing my ankles neatly before tucking them under the chair, before casually looking up at Barry when he asked, ‘Belong where?’
‘Here.’ A casual wave of my hand marked the plush décor. The mansion bore my imprint, but Grace’s influence lingered, for she had brought the stranger here. ‘Will this house make Enoch comfortable?’
‘Of course,’ Barry said, and jutted his short, round jaw out. ‘A stable or a mansion, he’ll be comfortable anywhere.’
Why did he always choose such inconvenient issues to be stubborn about? He married me for my strength; for the steel Zahra forged out of the ashes of Little Flower’s life. So why did he try to fight me?
‘He’s common,’ I said with finality. ‘He stares rudely. There’s no respect for the natural order of life: some people have their place, and his is not with us.’
To keep me safe, Enoch must stay on the other side of my boundary, the one I crossed long before Barry knew me. The one that kept Zahra, and all I’ve achieved since I caged Little Flower, impregnable.
