by Judy Croome
‘Ah,’ she sighed. ‘Zahra has a magic touch with these roses.’
I flushed with unwanted satisfaction at the small compliment. I thought I’d inured myself against such trifles as other people’s opinion of me, though my hurt at the Maswera’s request to name their babies after Grace, and not me, had taught me otherwise.
Now, like warm mother’s milk that slipped into my belly, the pleasure I took in Grace’s mild compliment reminded me I sought that which I should not: other people’s approbation. That need made me nervous, for there was a time when Little Flower existed only when her Daddy praised her.
Had Enoch heard what Grace had said? I slid a secret look at the front door. Barry coached the girl on how to fold the coat over her arm to reduce creasing. Enoch was there too, watching me watching them. He enmeshed me in his sea eyes, which were as silent as the ocean depths that harboured Little Flower.
I trembled with her, as the flush of Grace’s praise heated into a blaze of embarrassment and fear—yes, fear—for I strove to liberate myself from his unspoken promise but could not break free from the hold he had on me. Who was he that he could defeat a will as strong as Zahra’s?
The answer lay with that treacherous harlot Little Flower. As young and fragile as she was, she was a living ezomo, enticing men beyond their endurance.
Or so my Daddy said.
The unbearable thought of relinquishing that age-old power back to Little Flower gave Zahra strength. I firmed my spine and told myself I was no longer a child.
I said, ‘You came.’ With a practised, regal tilt of my head, I added, ‘Welcome back to the Templeton home, Enoch.’
I wrenched myself free from the sweet temptation in his face. I broke the hold of his gaze, gasping at the sudden sense of loss. The ocean monster called Little Flower stirred. I turned, and she howled out her silent rage, clawing into what was left of my heart, as I walked away from the stranger who was no stranger to her.
Chapter 7
Lulu
“The eye sees not itself
But by reflection, by some other things.”
They called it manslaughter. Because I was a Pale One and, in a rage, had once stabbed Taki, they gave me fifteen years, a harsher-than-usual sentence. For ten years, I sat in a cage of a prison, most of it in solitary, because no one wanted to share a cell with a Pale One. I had nothing to do in the dark, lonely nights but brood on the false promises of a false beloved.
They let me out five years early. Good behaviour, they said. I say they freed me because they were all, even the guards, afraid of my skin and the cloistered rage I scratched out night after night as I dug another lost day into the calendar I created on my cell wall. I had gouged three thousand, six hundred and forty nine strokes into that tiny space.
Tonight would have been the three thousand, six hundred and fiftieth gash, but instead they say, ‘You’re being released today. We’ve found you a job.’
I hold the small suitcase they gave me. They want me to sign for it: one suitcase, brown. One pair of jeans, blue. One bra, two panties, one shirt, all white. One nightgown, with thin yellow stripes. The rest of my earthly possessions I am wearing. ‘What kind of job?’ I ask, without much interest. I deliberately bump the Commandant as I lean over the desk to scrawl my signature across the page. I laugh when he shivers, rubbing his arm where I brushed it.
‘We organised it through the Earth Palace. There’s a parish Prior in the Old Sea City—’
I snort my disgust, at the same time shoving the few notes of cash he reluctantly hands me into my back pocket. ‘A Court?’ I sneer as I clamp down on the river of memories that engulfs me with smoky incense and warm love that’s a lie, and with Dalia and a betrayal that still burns. ‘You expect me to work in a Court?’
‘Yes.’ He snapped the receipt book shut. ‘Prior Ajani is willing to give you a job; no one else wanted to risk it. So don’t mess up. Here,’ he slid a piece of paper across the pockmarked desk, ‘is the address. The second address is your rooming house.’
I take it, and leave without a backward glance.
• • •
I first see the altar. Above it, the Spirit King-figure hangs immolated on the heavy nova, dull white paint peeling off eyebrows arched underneath the carved leopard skin coronet. Etched into the wooden face is an eternal pain that calls to me, though I resist its echo.
‘Come this way,’ Prior Ajani says. ‘I’ll introduce you to the others.’
I fear this moment, so I sigh and glance at my supposed king. Will I join him on his nova of misery? Or will this time be different?
In reality, I am an unbeliever. The Spirit King was never there when I needed him. Today, however, as I pass by the poignant symbol of hope to so many—once, even myself—instinct prompts me to make an almost-forgotten gesture. The sign of the nova flows easily, never forgotten, although it is years since I last entered a court. Afterwards I turn to follow the plump, elderly Prior into the Court Office.
‘Jamila,’ he calls to the blonde woman who stands in the corner next to a half-empty water-cooler. ‘Where’s Enoch?’
‘In the garden,’ she says and watches the cup she holds overflow in a bubble of pure, clean water. I tense, unhappy with the delay, for I’ve never found it easy waiting for the inevitable judgment based on the colour of my skin. Or lack of colour.
‘Shall I fetch him?’ she says and looks up at last. I hold my breath and, when her shock slips away into civility, I let it out.
I’m used to that reaction. I can deal with it. The days I hate my curse—the colourless skin and transparent hair that marks me as different—are the days when children scream aloud, or their parents damn me as the Levid even as they turn away.
This woman has steel in her. She recovers fast, and tucks a loose strand back into the neat, rather old fashioned bun she’s secured her hair in. ‘Hello,’ she says and walks towards me. ‘Welcome to the Court of St Jerome.’
My admiration is born when, with almost no hesitation, she holds out her hand and meets my intent gaze, distorted by the thick lenses of my spectacles, with an easy smile.
‘I’m Jamila Johnson.’ She waggles her left hand where a ring is safely nestled on the third finger. ‘Soon to be Mrs Jamila Templeton! You’ll be working mainly with me, but Prior Ajani or Enoch may need your help at times.’ With a wave in the vague direction of the window, she adds, ‘Enoch is happiest in his garden. I’ll take you to meet him later.’
I guess the blonde is the same age as me, nearly twenty-nine. Perhaps older, although that could be the effect of the string of pearls she wears, a lustrous cream beside the pale lemon jersey, neatly teamed with a conservative knee-length navy skirt.
‘I’m Luyando.’ Holding the sullen resentment of years, the harsh announcement creates a sudden, awkward silence. I add, less stridently, ‘Most people call me Lulu.’
A smile lights Jamila’s face and chases away the middle-class blandness. ‘We’re meant to be friends!’ She smiles at the blank stare I give her. ‘We have something in common—we’re both named after prophetesses from the Old Land.’ I don’t recognise her soft, furred tone, until I realise she’s trying to put me at my ease.
No one has been kind to me for years; the realisation forges an invisible bond between us. Once as dead as the ashes of my childhood love, the seed of hope blossoms. A smile curves a tentative journey around my lips as I look around the place where I will live out my future. Piles of paper and bags of old clothes for the needy pack the square and basic room. There is a window, facing east and overlooking a walled garden, which has a distant view of the ocean. Cupboards, and a small kitchenette, line the walls, which are bare except for a nova and a few faded portraits of the saints.
Jamila leads me to a small wooden table tucked away almost out of sight, chipped and scratched with years of memories. ‘Your desk is here, in the corner,’ she says. ‘You’ll find all you need in the drawers. I’ll show you what to do.’ She pulls out the chair, waves me i
nto it and spreads some official-looking documents embossed with a nova in front of me. ‘Oh, it’s lovely having another woman here. We’ll have some cosy chats when you’re more settled!’
The simple action, and the simple promise, are as commonplace as most of what we do every day. Only later—looking back through the years—do we come to realise those ordinary choices are often the critical turning points in our destiny.
Angry, as yet unknowing, I don’t recognise how her small act of friendship will change my life.
But it does.
Chapter 8
Jamila
“Assume a virtue, if you have it not.”
In the eight years that pass since the night she kissed her ezomo, Jamila’s bright new world changes shape.
‘The Pale One started work today,’ she tells Dawud.
A turned page is her answer, so she speaks louder, over the rustle. ‘Enoch never came in, though. He must be afraid.’
Her fiancé doesn’t lift his head from the newspaper he reads. He often appears more interested in the world’s news, than he is in the everyday trivialities of her life. “Crisis Grows as Northern War Crosses Border” reports the headline and Dawud, ever anxious about his helplessness to stop the destruction, devours every word.
‘Uh-huh,’ he says.
‘I tried to make her welcome. Not so…different.’ When Dawud doesn’t reply, she continues anyway. ‘I said we both have the names of great Prioresses.’
‘She liked that?’ Briefly, he peered over the top of the page.
‘Oh, yes!’ Jamila’s eyes light up to a pale green. ‘It helped her relax. I was glad to help,’ she adds as an afterthought.
‘You always are.’
‘I am. Aren’t I?’ She stands and smoothes the creases from her skirt to hide the cracks in her confidence. ‘Of course I am!’
She leaves him alone with his paper and, in the voluminous entrance hall, Jamila pauses by the mahogany cupboard she collected earlier from Dawud’s grandmother. She touches the wood, glossy from years of lavender polish rubbed into the dark grain and remembers her uncomfortable afternoon with the old woman…
…‘My dear Barry gave it to me,’ Dawud’s grandmother Zahra said to Jamila, as she walked into the old woman’s cottage. ‘When we married.’
The old woman smelled of wintergreen and antiseptic. A gnarled hand trembled over the dark sheen of wood, both finger and door stained with age and life. Memories,’ Dawud’s grandmother whispered as she hooked the dust out of this nick and palmed that scratch. ‘Always, the memories are here.’
Jamila sighed. The old woman wanted to talk, to go back in time as she often did, for her yesterdays were so much more alive to her than her todays. For a brief seductive moment, Jamila considered telling the truth. She was there to collect the cupboard. That’s all. There was no time to spare for a life already lived.
Her childhood vow kicked in: always be kind. All she could do then was to help the old woman back to her chair and let her ramble on. Placing her handbag on the closest table, she dismissed the removal men she’d hired. ‘Wait outside,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you when I need you.’
She turned back to Dawud’s grandmother with a grimace. She’s heard all the stories before, but she asked anyway. ‘Are they good memories, Granny Zahra?’
‘Some are.’
Granny Zahra gave a vague nod, gathering her thoughts. Jamila remembered how, when she was a child, standing at the street corner holding Papa’s begging cup out to the drivers, she saw a velvet dog in the back window of a car. No matter how carefully the driver manoeuvred the wheel, every little bump set the dog’s head bouncing up and down. It would bob frantically, weaving to a stop, until the driver misjudged a bump in the road, and the dog’s head would lurch into another flurry of movement. In almost the same way, Granny Zahra’s grey head stilled on her thin, bony chest, once a pert and attractive bosom, before the cancer took first one breast and then the other, and her eyes closed in the swiftness of an old person’s sleep.
Jamila began to wonder if the old woman had fallen asleep. She was annoyed because she wouldn’t be able to collect the cupboard. Another wasted afternoon. The weight of her engagement ring reminded her of all she had to do: the invitations, the caterers. Her dress and the million other touches needed to make her wedding day extraordinary.
Like all brides-to-be, before her and yet to come, she wanted her marriage ceremony to be special. No, more than special, she wanted it perfect. Now, instead of planning her dream day, here she was, waiting with stoic patience, for an old woman to awaken.
As the small grey head crumpled against the chair, framed by the minutiae of a life lived in another time, Jamila, for some reason, thought of the Pale One who had started work at the court. Would Lulu ever fall in love? Did she want a husband and children? What man could find her attractive enough to touch her with the same tenderness Jamila felt in Dawud’s hands as he stroked her, in those moments when the dark and passionate ezomo sprang to life in her breast? But, since that long-ago night when Daren Samanya had introduced her to her ezomo, Jamila kept that particular beast caged. She could not bear it if her ezomo ruined her chance to live out the Spirit King’s promise of a new life.
‘Memories…’ The old woman, awake again, gave a laugh, or—Jamila couldn’t afterwards remember—a sob, and jolted her out of her thoughts. She forgot the odd creature she had met earlier that day. ‘Memories,’ the old woman murmured, ‘are what you make them.’
Jamila turned to Granny Zahra; her surprise, she was sure, clear even to the old lady’s dim eyesight.
‘Sit down, sit down,’ Granny Zahra ordered, irascible as ever. ‘You can’t escape yet.’
‘I…I…didn’t want to escape.’
Granny Zahra grunted and fell silent. Soon Jamila couldn’t bear the silence any longer and reached for her purse. As she did, the old woman shifted straighter and leaned into the side wing of the gilt parlour chair. The elaborate Victorian chair, covered in the same faded ruby damask as when Jamila lived with Dawud’s grandmother on her arrival in the Old Sea City, was still the old woman’s favourite.
When the old woman sank deeper into the comfort of her chair, Jamila found it difficult to tell which was older, and almost as impossible to tell which was animate and which was not.
‘Be careful, Jamila.’
The words were loud in the dusty silence but Jamila was unsure she heard correctly. ‘Be careful? Of what, Granny Zahra?’
‘Memories, child, memories…’
She waited, and waited some more, but the old woman drifted off into sleep, or to a place where she couldn’t follow. This won’t end anytime soon, Jamila thought, and sneaked a glance at her watch, hoping the removal men wouldn’t leave.
‘Time…there’s never enough time to say sorry.’
An echo of old pain, a barely audible quaver, brushed into life some long-dead emotion in Jamila. She leaned forward to touch the elderly woman’s arm.
‘Eighty-five years is a long time, Granny Zahra,’ she said. ‘You’ve had so much more time than most people.’
‘Time is never enough, never enough. The memories are too many.’
‘But it’s good to have memories.’ A smile as swift as a butterfly lifted the edges of her mouth. ‘I want to make memories with Dawud. Memories and friends and babies.’ Heat licked along her veins, making her talk of safer matters. ‘Dawud and I want to make memories of a happy family.’ A perfect family, she added to herself, as different to her imperfect childhood as possible. ‘Those will be the memories to hold onto.’
‘There’ll be other memories. The ones etched onto your mind with a blunt blade. The ones you’ll wish you never made.’
‘I don’t think so, Granny Zahra.’
She laughed a half-genuine laugh. These days, Jamila hardly ever regretted her choices because, every word, every action, she evaluated in her own mind as she checked her inner benchmark: the word of Spirit King. The world, she b
elieved, would be a better place if more people did the same. Then, like buried treasures saved for the paucity of old age, one could haul the good memories out and forget the others.
‘Don’t be so sure, child. You can’t always control your memories.’
‘If not me, then who?’
‘Fate.’
‘Oh, Granny Zahra!’ Jamila gave a queer little laugh. ‘There is no Fate.’ She allowed for a mind trained in a time when humanity was far more naïve than today. ‘The Spirit King gave us free will. We can choose what we do.’
‘The Spirit King, Fate—there’s no difference in the lies people tell themselves.’ Petulance slurred the words, but the old woman’s eyes were bright with challenge. ‘What do you know of free will, child? Your life has hardly begun. You don’t have enough memories yet! How can you know what suffering is?’
The pain that always hovered came alive. It clenched inside Jamila as her ezomos scavenged in the damp fertile blackness of her unconscious. The echo of coins clattering into a tin mug; the forlorn faces of the young brothers she had abandoned; and the scent of sex under a moonlit night all threatened to bedevil her composure. She tamped the memories down, crushing them back into the cellars in her mind. Had Granny Zahra forgotten where she came from?
Granny Zahra’s words were a joke. To say Jamila, who had suffered so much, didn’t understand making a choice! To say that she, whose new life Daren Samanya had almost destroyed with his seduction of her innocence, had not suffered…! Jamila took a deep, calming breath. The old woman had lived too comfortable a life to be able to understand the buried afflictions of another’s less privileged life.
‘I’ve suffered.’ She could explain her pain in no other way. ‘When you’re different, people can be cruel.’
‘Jamila, child, you don’t suffer from what other people do to you. Real suffering comes from what you do to others.’
