by Judy Croome
I turned away and wiped the taste of him off my lips. I gathered myself and called on Zahra to come forth and banish Little Flower’s weakness, that ezomo called love, which hurt and hurt.
Before I found myself, Enoch pulled me towards him. I resisted, but ultimately surrendered to his irresistible gentleness. I leaned back into his chest and his arms enfolded me in a touch as soft as an angel’s wings.
‘Little Flower,’ he sighed. ‘Ah, sweet Little Flower.’ His chin rested on the top of my head and he rocked me from side to side, as he murmured words in an ancient tongue I didn’t understand. They soothed me anyway and I sank into the comfort of his embrace. I waited, and longed for, his hands to cover my breasts. Perhaps then, I would find the answers to the restless uncertainties Little Flower had spawned since this stranger came into my life.
‘I love you, Enoch,’ I murmured, as I had often whispered to my Daddy, even when I wept and wished that love could be different. ‘I love you.’
‘Not really,’ he replied. ‘Not yet.’ He swept his hands over my body, up and down. The same fleeting warmth that rose in me when Barry touched me, after I had invited him into my bed, flickered on the edge of a consuming flame. ‘This is not love,’ Enoch said. He pushed me away until we touched with clasped hands and he held me captive with a gaze that contained the wisdom of aeons.
I began to drown in those eyes. Deep, deep they took me, to the centre of my world, that centre where there was no secrets. There, I delved into Little Flower’s face, unadorned except with the truth. I saw her tears and I could not tell whether she wept for loving her Daddy too much, or whether her tears were for the day Zahra conquered her and she discovered that love had many faces, one of which was hate.
With a gasp, I dragged my hands from Enoch’s clasp and drew on all the dignity I had as I said, ‘We’ll ignore this, shall we?’
‘Tonight is already a memory,’ he said. ‘Let it be a good one.’
‘A foolish one!’
‘Love is never foolish,’ he said. ‘But you’re not yet ready to love me as you can.’
He cupped my cheek in his palm. I reacted instinctively and nestled my face into his warmth. What did he want from me? I had already offered him the best of me and the best of Little Flower too.
‘How else can I love you?’ I asked.
‘Let your heart’s voice speak,’ he replied. ‘Look with your inner eye. There you will find the truth of what love is.’
Before I could answer, before I could ask him what he meant, he melted away into a moonbeam. He followed it off the balcony to the edge of a rose garden, where an old woman waited.
I thought he had joined the old crone, the healer woman I once saw in the shadows of his eyes. I leaned forward over the balustrade, unconcerned that the late evening damp stained my dress. I saw the silver hair and realised he had left me for Grace.
For Grace. That bitch, that whore, Saint Grace, had stolen Little Flower’s love. Even though people loved her more than anyone could love me, she had stolen my Enoch.
And he, he had left me there, alone. I began to weep with anger. Later, I wept for Little Flower, a lost young girl whose ezomo was not that she had never loved at all, but that she had once loved her Daddy too well to ever love again.
Chapter 13
Lulu
“One that loved not wisely, but too well.”
From the day I witness Prior Ajani prepare for his ritual, the altar calls to me. I resist its lure but the wooden nova continues to beguile me. I stare at each leopard skin rosette in the coronet around the Spirit King’s forehead. Each rosette, carved as a hole into the hard olive wood, has a hollow wooden bell suspended from it, a symbol of the Spirit King’s spirit tempted by the Levid and saved by his love for his people.
I must wrench myself free from the sweet promise in his face as I ignore the supplication of the nova. But his wooden eyes burn into my back as, hearing the clink of the coffee percolator, I hurry through to the court office. I smile. That’s Jamila. She likes to make the dark, bitter brew the old Prior sweetens with six heaped spoons of sugar. She’ll take him his coffee; then she’ll fill my mug, before pouring her own.
We have become close, Jamila and I, since the day she told me about her father. The blossoming closeness reminds me of what I shared with Sub-Prioress Dalia before I grew to hate her for betraying my love. But Jamila is different from the quiet nun; she is a serene mix of strength and kindness. She is a true believer and she will not fail the tenets of her Spirit King.
With unspoken agreement, we both arrive half-an-hour earlier than we need to. I savour those thirty minutes of the day; suck every drop of enjoyment out of them as one sucks the rich, juicy marrow from a bone. Like the marrow, they’re gone too soon. I’m left hungry for more but, unused to such a feast of friendship, I hold back and wait for Jamila to make the next move.
‘Hi,’ I say as I enter the office.
Jamila is at the fridge, its doors covered in colourful magnets in the shape of the Spirit King-mask, left over from a long ago fund-raising drive. She pours milk into a jug. St Jerome’s lies in a wealthy neighbourhood, and receives generous stipends from its courtiers—Jamila’s fiancé Dawud is a big-hearted donor—but there’s never any money to waste. Prior Ajani uses most of it for his War Relief Fund.
The Fund doesn’t leave much for luxuries in the court, so Jamila measures out our day’s quota of milk. Today, she discards an empty carton as she greets me with a smile, asking ‘How was your weekend?’
If anyone else had asked me that question, their civility merely covering their fear of my pale skin so different from theirs, I would have mumbled a non-committal answer. Whose business is it but mine that I speak to no one from the time I leave the court on Fridays until I return on Mondays? But Jamila asks, so I tell the truth.
‘Dull.’
She blinks and half-laughs. ‘Just…dull?’
‘Duller than dull.’
She half-smiles. ‘What did you do?’
‘I read, watched TV. Not much else.’
‘And the sea? Didn’t you find time to go to the sea?’
How much truth is necessary between friends? Before she betrayed me, Dalia was more Mother than friend, so I’ve never had a real friend before. To tell her I never learned how to swim is too much truth. So I say, ‘Not this weekend. Maybe another time.’
‘Oh, you must try, Lulu! Sometimes, when Dawud is asleep, I sit on the veranda and watch the sunrise over the ocean. The Spirit King’s “good morrow” is the most beautiful sight in the world. His gift, to me and me alone.’ She laughs, a touch embarrassed. ‘That’s a silly fancy, thinking all that beauty is mine. There must be a thousand people who see the same sight.’ She dips her head and concentrates on stirring the coffee and hiding her discomfiture.
I love to hear her talk. She is kind, a purity separate from the rancour I meet outside these walls, the same rancour that I carry within my bones. Perhaps one day, I allow myself to dream, she’ll invite me to share her gift. We’ll sit on the veranda of the Templeton mansion, in a companionable silence, as the dark night turns into day and the sun ushers in the pink-tinged dawn.
‘Do you—’ Hoarse with my secret hope, I clear my throat. ‘Do you swim often?’
‘When I arrived in the sea city, I swam as often as I could.’ She wrinkles her nose in concentration as she counts the spoons of coffee she puts in the machine. ‘There’s no time these days. Everything is such a rush and the final arrangements for the wedding are taking so much of my time.’
I hear more and more about her marriage plans. It will be large—the Templetons are old money—and Jamila is anxious for her day to be perfect. As crazy as it seems, I sometimes suspect that Jamila is as uncertain of her place in this world as I am of mine.
‘How are they going?’
She wiggles a hand, palm down. ‘So-so. Dawud has no interest in the details, and I don’t like to ask Granny Zahra.’
‘Why not?’ I ba
rk and, not wanting Jamila to mistake who I’m angry with, I add, ‘The old lady—this Zahra—should be happy to help you.’
Jamila sighs and a fierce urge to protect her consumes me. I may not have been a friend to anyone before, but I know at least this: friends take care of each other. And I begin to understand how much I would do to keep this woman’s friendship.
‘If I asked her,’ she grimaces, ‘I suppose she would.’
I grin. I, too, have a pride that resents the need to beg for help. ‘But you’ll never ask!’
‘Never,’ she answers, and we laugh.
My laughter is perilously close to tears. What would Jamila think if she knew how moved I am by such ordinary moments? To someone like her, friendship must be a normal part of life. How can she guess I sail into waters deeper than the ocean I have never swum in, without even the map of experience to guide me? I change the subject.
‘She gave you her favourite cupboard and her pearls, though, so she can’t disapprove of you.’
‘Granny Zahra doesn’t disapprove,’ Jamila says. She places my coffee on my desk, milky and sugarless as I like it and, taking her own mug with her, she begins to prepare for the day’s work.
As she walks to her filing cabinet the morning sun peeps through the office windows and accents wisps of her hair. A rush of air, cold and insubstantial, embraces me. I stare, and blink. But the tendrils of light continue to shimmer around her head like a halo.
As I stare at the phenomenon, an invisible hand, moist with blood spilt by a hammered nail and yet comforting, reaches out from the silence of Prior Ajani’s courthouse. My back, facing the door to the nave where that damned wooden nova endures, twitches and the Spirit King tempts me once more.
The small round scar in my palm, the one from the day so long ago when my rage was born and I stabbed the girl Taki, begins to throb. A seductive whisper fills my head. ‘Behold,’ it says, ‘what I offer, when you return unto me.’
I scramble upright and, grabbing a ruler, stretch it over my shoulder, quelling both the itch on my back and the impossible promise in my head. Jamila, startled, pauses as she reaches into the cupboard. ‘Do you need help?’ she asks. She turns her head, moving it into the shadows and the bright ring of gold is lost.
Although my spirit cries yes, I refuse her offer. A part of me—the same foolish part of my youthful self that believed the Controllers’ promises that, if I appealed hard enough and long enough to the Spirit King, my skin would colour me loved—that part of me almost believes that if Jamila, with her golden halo of hair, touches me now, I will be beloved.
Sitting abruptly, and shifting my chair so that my back no longer faces the door to the nave, I say, ‘The itch is gone, thanks,’ and refocus on her words. ‘Dawud’s grandmother…?’
Jamila unpacks three files: Court Correspondence, St Jerome’s War Relief Fund and Excommunication Requests, and slams the door shut. She frowns down at them. I suspect she will not answer, so I stay quiet, afraid I’ve been too bold.
‘She never disapproved of me.’ Her head tilts, and she toys with the strand of pearls ever-present around her neck. ‘She gave me these pearls on our engagement. But…’
I wait until she sighs and adds, ‘Granny Zahra has always been…eccentric.’
I keep my face blank, except for a little interest to fill the emptiness. Curiosity stirs in me. All I’ve heard about Granny Zahra has been no different from most other old people, uncertain of the future and petulant with regret that their lives haven’t matched the promise of their youthful dreams. ‘Isn’t it her age?’
‘It’s more than that. She’s not senile. She’s distant. She helps people—she helped me a little bit when I arrived in the city.’ She shakes her head free of some thought I’m not privy to, before flipping the file open. ‘She’s a hard woman. She helps people, but it’s like…like she does it because she must, not because she wants to.’
Her words take me back into the bitterness. In the ten years since I left Sub-Prioress Dalia to weep over the dead body of her lover, I rarely visit the memories of my time at the court holding camp. The Controllers, representatives of the Spirit King, his servants in the Earth Palace, had not cared out of love. They did it because they had to. The Spirit King had died fighting for love and peace. So the Eden Books would have us believe. But if the holy ones, those earth servants charged with perpetuating his task, are incapable of rising to the fullness of love, what hope, then, do ordinary people like Granny Zahra have? What hope do I have? I was lost to love long ago; lost from the moment I was born different, with a skin too pale for forgiveness.
Jamila has begun her work in earnest. I have wasted the last precious seconds of our friendship time on malignant memories when they are all behind me. I am free to start a new life.
What is it about the people of St Jerome? The old Prior with his robes and his thorns calling to my spectres. Enoch, his seraphic smile a siren’s promise of renewed dreams. And Jamila…Jamila, whose quiet friendship makes the dreams real.
Deep inside me, my tomorrows now carry the promise of more than despair. They blossom with the hope of warmth, of amity and even, perhaps, of a sweet, sweet love unlike any I have ever savoured before.
Chapter 14
Jamila
“These days are dangerous:
Virtue is choked with foul ambition,
and charity chased hence by rancour’s hand.”
As Dawud drives them through the night, Jamila, alone with her thoughts, grapples with the danger that awaits her at the Samanya’s dinner party. All the way there, she fights hard to restore her inner calm.
She hasn’t exchanged more than a few words with Samanya in years, although he travels in the same circles as the Templetons. If she can’t avoid him, she nods at him across the room. She hates him. Hates what he did to her. Her hand creeps up to hook under the triple strands of gold Dawud gave her. They’re cold against her skin and she longs instead for the dry wooden scrape of her old Spirit King-mask, with its cheap coral bead and rough edges.
If only Dawud…but he wasn’t there, that night on the balcony, and it’s her error. Her error that she must bear alone for, each time Dawud desires her, her guilt weds her absolution and happiness slips further away.
‘Do you want me, Jilly?’ he’ll ask. Home from the golf club, he’ll smell of cut grass, alcohol, and masculine camaraderie as he puts his arms around her.
She says yes. Of course, she says yes. Even when she longs to say, ‘No, we should be married,’ she says yes and ends up feeling dirty and used.
All she feels tonight, however, as they sweep into the driveway of the Samanya mansion—bigger even than the Templeton mansion—all she feels is an unspeakable, scandalous desire.
‘Holy fug!’ Dawud breathes, as he stops the car. As expected in this prestigious suburb, so vulnerable to car theft and hijacks, a uniformed security guard opens Jamila’s car door before hurrying around to open his. ‘What a view!’
The house looks out over the same bay as their home does. Perched higher on the mountain the view is panoramic. Jamila looks down and sees the ever-present sea spread out before them, anointed with ghost-white crests whipped up by the strong southeaster wind that also lifts her skirt and plucks at the edges of her upswept hair.
The ocean lurks, black as the descending night, and foreboding slithers through Jamila. Whose face, she wonders sickly, will the Levid wear tonight: Daren Samanya’s, or her own?
‘Jilly, come and look at this!’ Dawud waves her next to him. ‘It must be a fantastic fugging view in daylight!’
All she can answer is a sharp, ‘Don’t swear, Dawud,’ and a frown replaces the eagerness that turns his pleasant face into handsomeness.
‘Have you got the sulks, Jilly?’
Tonight she’s tense enough to damn the consequences of speaking her mind. ‘I don’t sulk,’ she says. ‘We’re already late because you wanted to…you wanted…I’m sure we’re the last guests to arrive!’
&
nbsp; ‘But a guest who is worth the wait.’ As seductive as the ocean itself, temptation surrounds her. A hand slips high around her waist, high enough that his thumb brushes the underside of her breast.
Tonight Jamila isn’t worried about mended underwear. She wears expensive French lace. What terrifies her is the instant recognition that blazes through her. Wasn’t nine years of waiting to marry Dawud and denying her desire a long enough penance to overcome the enticement of her ezomo?
She forces herself to move, enough to dislodge his hand. Her skin, wrapped in the frivolous black crêpe, keeps the memory of his hand. The outline of it, there, under her left breast, pulses and beats with an illicit, voracious appetite.
‘Sorry we’re late, Samanya.’ Dawud—dear Dawud, a good man, her saviour, she once hoped—abandons the view. He takes his place by her side but his softer grip doesn’t alleviate the imprint of Daren Samanya’s festering mark. ‘We were a bit delayed. Couldn’t help it,’ he says, and grins.
Jamila recoils with the old shame. For, in silent man-speak, Dawud tells Samanya what delayed them. She understands from the way Samanya’s gaze slides up her body and lingers on a provocative glimpse of her cleavage. The white flesh bears the faint rasp of Dawud’s beard. Sex, that Levid’s song, Samanya’s euphony, whispers in her head, dirty dirty delicious sex.
‘Lucky you,’ he says, and grins back at Dawud, but his lazy blue eyes call to her ezomo. He stands there, so tall, so beautiful—can an ordinary man be beautiful?—and she sees it in his eyes. He knows. He knows. Even though she washed, and dabbed on more perfume, he can smell it on her and it excites him.
She wants to weep with despair, for she has no one to save her except herself, and she isn’t strong enough. Not then, not this time, not ever, once she had removed her old wooden Spirit King pendant.
