by Judy Croome
I thread my way through the pithas, which are dreary with age. The carved initials of bored courtiers scuff the wood in some places; in others, little brass plaques, which Jamila tells me I must shine every day, are screwed in place.
I always start with the one clamped to the front pitha. It reads “Grace Obinna Templeton.” There is a heat to her plaque: her unfettered spirit reaching out through the veils between the worlds. ‘Good afternoon, Grace,’ I murmur in my head. ‘Are you well?’
I begin to caress her engraved memory and hear a whisper. ‘Good afternoon, Luyando dear,’ the sweet, soft sound of my imagination replies. ‘Have you had a good day?’
And, as I’d dreamed before I stopped dreaming, I tell her of my day, of the tentative steps towards a friendship with Jamila. I would’ve shared these small joys with the mother who abandoned me, and Dalia, before she forgot me; instead, I share them with a warm brass plaque. When I move onto the next plaque, which reads “Bakari Dawud Templeton I,” I’m almost at peace. I take my time and wipe each letter clean. I polish each small screw, so I can spend as long as possible next to the relic of Grace’s spirit.
As I finish, I linger, and bend to place a quick kiss on her plaque. Why did I do that? Goosebumps raise the flesh on my arms. I have the eerie sense that someone watches. I peer around, into the gloom of the old stone court, but there is no one except the blind wooden face of the sacrificed Spirit King above me.
‘What else am I supposed to kiss?’ I sneer at that stupid man on his stupid nova. His relentless sorrow bears down on me; I swear I see a tear roll down his cheek. I blink and it’s gone. I shiver and hurry into the next pitha, tripping over a pair of long legs. They stretch out in front of an Outlander. A man with impassive eyes that shift and swirl from blue to grey as does the ocean, lying stagnant with temptation, there beyond the court gardens.
Where was he when I glanced around? Did he hear my blasphemy? ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ I demand. I’m embarrassed that he saw me kiss an old brass plaque.
He stands, and I have to tilt my chin up and up. He is tall, elongated. His fine black hair, black as the Levid’s wings, is loosely tied back with a thong. A silver earring glints in one ear. His leather jacket has no sleeves and, on one arm, I see a red heart, pierced by three swords. Tattooed on the other arm, floating above a small Spirit King nailed in blue to his bicep, a banner reads “Faith & Hope & Charity.” L-O-V-E screams the fingers of his left hand; P-E-A-C-E the other. A biker! A Spirit King-be-damned biker, right down to the tattoos.
With neither Prior Ajani nor Jamila around, I must help him. But strangers are bad news. Faced with their judgment of my difference, I fade and become less than who I have discovered I am.
I sigh and place the can of Brasso and the rags on the nearest pitha. Experts have humiliated me. Why should I care if this man saw me kiss a court pitha? Or care what he makes of my bleached appearance?
‘Can I help you?’ I say. ‘Are you lost?’
‘Not as lost as some,’ he replies.
I’m not in the mood for jokes. I stare at him and use my idiot scowl. I’ve learnt a lot I shouldn’t with that expression. It comforts people who assume my brain is as blank as my skin. They’ll talk about secrets they would never talk about in front of me if they knew how much I understood. I can keep it in place for hours, as I did when the police interrogated me about Sub-Prioress Kapera’s death.
This time, though, I find it hard to sustain. He stands there and lets me gaze my fill. His old-young face, although held in calm repose, threatens to devour me as the ocean devours those unwary enough to ignore its unseen power.
A monstrous spirit pulses to life deep inside me. If I give it a chance, it’ll flood my being with darkness and destroy me. I force myself to step backwards to break its spell.
‘Who are you?’ I rasp the demand. ‘What do you want?’
‘I work here,’ he says. ‘In the garden.’ He wipes his hand along his jeans and holds it out. Warily, I take it, surprised when he doesn’t flinch. ‘I’m Tikkum Enoch Dakarai,’ he says. ‘Most people call me Enoch.’ His wry grin forgives me my bark of astonished laughter at his name.
I let his hand, warm and tingly, drop and surprise myself with a joke. ‘We each have our nova to bear.’
He knows I talk of myself and the lean face softens, the high cheekbones blur as kindness seeps into his gaze. I cannot bear his pity. Somehow, pity is worse than hatred. How can anyone understand a life lived in my skin?
I snarl his sympathy away. ‘A name is the least of it!’ As I curl my lip at him, his eyes ebb into a deeper grey. I step closer and widen the curl so my upper teeth show. I learned that act in prison; tough and unrepentant women ran from me when I donned that particular mask.
‘Do you want to scare me?’ he asks, patting the pockets of his leather jacket. He pulls out a blue pack of Gauloises Blondes, and lights one. Pursing his lips, he blows a perfect circle of smoke towards the altar.
Even I, having seen the deepest wickedness masquerade as compassion, am shocked into neglecting my pose.
‘You can’t smoke here!’ I gasp.
Another perfect circle wafts away from him. ‘Why not?’
‘It’s…it’s…you’re in a court! A holy place!’
‘Why should you care?’ he mocks. ‘An unbeliever like you.’
Why indeed? I can’t answer him. He unsettles my spirit, so I do what I do best. I go on the attack. I grab his cigarette. ‘Stop it,’ I say, and crush the stub out with my teeth. A trick I taught myself to look mean and dangerous.
‘Impressive,’ he says and throws back his head. Laughter rolls out his throat and touches a part of me I never knew existed. When I think of my posturing, of how ridiculous I had looked when I practised it in the small square of mirror that was all they allowed us in prison, I can’t contain a small grin. I haven’t laughed in an eternity. His laughter invites me to join him and I hardly recognise the scratchy sound as mine.
‘Well done, Luyando,’ he says, and strokes a slender finger down my cheek. His touch is enough of a shock that tears leak from me and replace the laughter. I forget until much, much later that I had not told him my name.
• • •
The next time I meet him is in the Garden of Remembrance. I clutch an offering of fragrant white roses I bought from the crone who sells flowers under the old bladdernut tree outside the court grounds and I go to find the small vault that holds Grace’s ashes. He is there before me and wipes the dew off the miniature marble angel placed over her urn. A short way away, his garden trowel imprisons a pile of weeds as a light morning wind blows the smell of the sea through the court grounds.
‘You’re early, Luyando,’ he says, even though his back is towards me, and I’d made no noise.
‘So are you.’ I stop next to him. He stays hunched down, the damp cloth draped between his open thighs. I risk a look at him but he locks his gaze on the marble statuette. The silence grows until I’m dizzy with it. The thorns of the white roses prick my clenched fingers and I shiver as the breeze deepens with moisture from the bay.
I want to ask him how he knew my name, but somehow I talk about the weather. ‘It’ll rain today,’ I say.
He glances up at my words, and sniffs the air. ‘Perhaps,’ he says, and stands upright, so I am in his shadow. I step back, uncomfortable with his nearness.
‘We need the rain,’ I say, to fill the silence.
‘It will come,’ he says, ‘but not yet.’
He brushes some dirt off his hands, and slots them into his jeans. They fit him well, tightly outlining his lean, muscular thighs and, in that instant, a thought I would never have dared to allow myself before swims to the surface of my mind. Unlike other men I meet, he’s comfortable with me; he acts as if I’m no different from him. Could it be that, like Jamila and Prior Ajani who bless me with small touches of friendship, my body is of no consequence to him? Can the impossible become possible…no! As he has weeded this secluded
garden, I weed out that thought before it begins to grow. For it would take a miracle, and miracles are the delusions of those who have the power or money or looks to afford them.
‘If you say so,’ I reply, brusque, and then guilty, with a disappointment that has no right to exist. He is not the scapegoat for the shapeless rage that ricochets round my life. I can’t bring myself to smile at him, but I ask more gently, ‘Why won’t it rain?’
He shrugs, and bends over the pile of debris. With a small brush made of reeds and wood, he sweeps it into a black plastic bag in a gesture that, despite the garish letters that adorn his hands, is somehow too delicate for such an earthy task. I saw a TV programme once, of a piano concerto. The camera focused on the black-and-white keys, and the musician’s fingers, as long and elegant as this man’s, flowed over the keyboard.
‘Call it gardener’s intuition,’ he says and smiles. What that smile does to me is unbearable.
‘Yes.’ The word holds all my resentment of Enoch’s kindness, of my life that is without any meaning except to suffer.
‘The Spirit King is your friend, Luyando,’ he says, ending the lilting promise with a lie I’ve heard too often before. ‘He loves you.’
I shake my head. I do not want to hear more about that man on the nova. Nor do I want to recognise the temptation he offers as this man, who is as real as the other on the nova is not, lays a gentle touch on my arm. For a moment, I pretend Enoch’s warmth is not pity and savour it, before turning my back on him.
I am angry at his intrusion into the time I wanted with Grace; angry for wanting what can never be mine.
Sorry, Grace, I whisper in my head to her angel, and toss the white roses on to the grass at the foot of the Remembrance Wall.
Stay, I hear the leaves rustle, stay with him. I refuse to listen. Unrequited love is a dish I have no more need to taste. Jamila’s friendship is all I can hope for, to fill the hollows in my heart. One friend will be enough. I need no one else. Without even a backward glance to where the clink of the trowel tells me he’s digging weeds from between the stone path slabs, I leave the garden and shut the decorative wooden gate behind me.
What can Enoch say that I need to hear? His Spirit King coloured me paler than white, and his Spirit King allowed my heart to dream of dreams my body prohibits. This same Spirit King was the one who sent Enoch and Dalia—yes, the good Sub-Prioress Dalia too—to show me just how hopeless dreams of love for one such as I are.
• • •
I can’t believe Enoch when he says the Spirit King loves me, for I stopped believing Dalia’s promise that the Spirit King loves me years ago, on the day she refused to watch me sacrifice myself for love. That was the day I realised the Spirit King is a fiction. A gross deceit imposed on frightened children who grow into terrified adults, too scared to stop their rituals because maybe there is a Spirit King after all.
‘Better go to court on Holy Day,’ they say. ‘Rather safe than sorry,’ they add, with an instinctive shiver bred of too many hours spent in the Earth Palace. ‘Who wants to burn in hell?’
In their innermost thoughts, they believe there is no Spirit King. Yet still they fill the Courtyards and Earth Palaces; the Churches, Temples, Mosques and Synagogues. Believer or unbeliever, they are all the same in their secret fears.
Fools! The lot of them are fools.
I can tell them a person can survive hell. I’ve lived it for nearly thirty years, and I survive. Hell is not hot. Hell is cold, cold as the ice that freezes my emotions as I leave Enoch whistling in the garden behind me.
I’ve never had a lover. I accepted long ago that, with a Pale One’s ghostly looks, no one could ever want to love me. When I gaze in the mirror, I can’t blame them. Not exactly. For beneath this pale skin—the nova that is my burden to bear in the mediocre life I call my own—am I not one with those I meet? Yet they cannot love me for what I am beneath my skin.
I have to pass through the courthouse to reach the office I share with Jamila. My feet drag as I trudge to the altar. The Spirit King hangs unchanged: sad, sorrowful and suffering.
‘Are you always so miserable?’ I say aloud, the question tinny in the empty court.
A crack of laughter startles me. When I turn around, I find Prior Ajani behind me, his chubby frame bobbing with the remnants of his laugh.
‘I’m on my way to the office,’ I explain. ‘I’ll leave.’
‘Stay, child. Let’s talk awhile.’
I shake my head. ‘You came to work,’ I say and point to the tray he puts down on the pitha nearest to him. ‘I don’t want to stop you.’
‘I came to make a petition for the spirits of the dead soldiers. They can wait a few minutes.’
‘The dead soldiers?’
‘The lunchtime news,’ he sighs. ‘Another thirty soldiers died in The War. Twenty of ours. Ten of theirs.’
I point to the wooden figure suspended above us. ‘No wonder he can’t smile,’ I say. I don’t care if I offend the Prior with my irreverence. How many people care whether I am offended, when they stare and whisper as I walk by?
Prior Ajani’s heavy, clean-shaven jowls wobble over his shiny collar, so round and white, as white as the rose Sub-Prioress Dalia used to lay next to my pillow. ‘Pain is pain, even if it belongs to those we like to call our enemy,’ he says. He nods at the Spirit King image. ‘He suffers.’
He walks to stand next to me. This close, I can spot the sparse patches of grey beard he missed as he shaved. He brushes my forearm, bare beneath the short frilled sleeve of my blouse. The touch on my skin has become familiar. Jamila and then Enoch. Now this podgy little man. They touch me as if there is no difference between us, as if I am an ordinary person whose different skin colour is not something to fear.
‘He suffers,’ he repeats. ‘Like you do.’
The nova blurs and melts like the waxen tears of a burning candle. I can hear nothing; sense nothing, except the same whispering scurry of wings that threatened to engulf me when first I met Enoch.
‘I’m not suffering,’ my pride denies. ‘I’m happy,’ I lie, and the black tide ebbs as quickly as it rose. I’m unsure exactly what it is I push away.
He gives my arm a final squeeze. ‘If you say so.’ His lips tilt at the corners as if he is privy to some information denied to me. He says no more, but fetches his tray and transfers his treasures to the altar. Some candles and matches. Incense. Bread and wine, some dried twigs that could be acacia, or sickle bush, and a bottle of palm oil mixed with beach sand.
Prior Ajani notices how the tools of his trade interest me. He reaches over and crushes a few of the leaves with flat fat fingers, before mixing them with a dollop of sand and palm oil. A sharp smell, sweet, cleansing, and familiar, assails my nostrils. And I see Sub-Prioress Dalia, alive in my imagination. Sitting naked in her bathtub, her white, white breasts swinging, as she tried to purge her restless spirit. Prior Ajani prepares this same ritual for the dead warriors. He rubs the palm oil and sand over the branches, ignoring the sting of the thorns.
‘What do you use?’ I ask, unable to ignore the leaf fragments as they sink in lazy spirals to the floor.
‘Buffalo-thorn.’ He offers me a twig, shiny, and rough with oil and sand. ‘Take some, so we can collect the spirits of the soldiers and bring them home.’
‘No,’ I grate, ‘they don’t need my help.’
I turn, the smell of tree and oil and sand strong in my head. I stumble and crash to the floor on my knees. There’s a familiar pain as the hard stone floor scrapes them a bloody red, but before the Prior can reach out to help, I push myself upright and run. I do not stop until I can slam the office door: to keep him out, to keep him away.
Then I am safe. Safe from the unctuous benevolence of the holy man. From his useless altar. And, most especially, I am safe from the mendacious image of the Spirit King who has always mocked all the dreams I ever dared to have.
Chapter 11
Jamila
“I must go and meet with d
anger there,
Or it will seek me in another place
and find me worse provided.”
Jamila stands and inspects her appearance in the long mirror in the bathroom, the one with rust along the edges where the moisture from the shower seeps under the glass. Her new life is so different to the old one. But she remembers the days she saw patches rather than perfection.
She wipes a cloth across the mirror and wishes it were as easy to wipe away the images of a different Jamila. One young and uncertain when she arrived in the city; an innocent, believing in the promises of her beloved Spirit King. That innocence was gone, buried beneath the struggle of preparing herself to become Mrs Dawud Templeton.
So many interminable years and she wonders if they will ever accept her. The struggle has exhausted her. In bed long before Dawud came home from his business dinner last night, she’s tired. Tired and restless, as she is most of the time.
She blames the Pale One. The days, the weeks, of being kind to Lulu. Jamila has never forgotten the promise she made herself, that day beneath the iridescent Spirit King-mask that looked down on her from the high school gates. She’d never realised how difficult it would be to keep that promise.
The door to the bathroom slides open and the squeaky castor Dawud hasn’t oiled breaks into her thoughts.
‘G’morrow, Jilly,’ he greets as he stumbles into the bathroom. The business lunches he enjoys settle too easily around his middle and his underpants sag beneath his belly as he leans one hand on the marbled wall. ‘O Spirit King!’ he groans as his other hand reaches into his crumpled shorts to draw out his semi-flaccid penis, which he aims with careless habit at the toilet bowl.
‘Good morrow,’ she replies and studies his reflection in the mirror. Where, she wonders, has her beautiful saviour gone? Buried in the earthiness of a decade of intimacy, she decides, as Dawud yawns and shakes himself dry before wandering across to peck her on the cheek.
‘What time did you arrive home?’ she asks.
‘Late.’ A sour belch rumbles out of him. ‘Sorry,’ he says, with a grin that stretches his eyes into mischievousness.
