by Judy Croome
‘Me too?’ I dare to ask.
‘Of course,’ she says, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.
But I’ve never been invited anywhere before. Not as a child in the holding camp, and not in the ten years I was in prison. I’m almost too scared to believe that I’ve understood her. Does she mean…could she mean…that I, too, will receive an invitation? Like an ordinary person. Like a friend.
Before I came to this court, I hadn’t cried since the time I became an unbeliever. Yet, here I am, unable to hold the tears back. I leave the office so they do not notice how moved I am. Some part of me, the part that ferments with tamped-down rage, fears their pity. An inevitable pity if they realise that such an ordinary thing as an invitation to a wedding is akin to a miracle. For, to one who has never had the luxury of normality, even the most mundane experience can be a transfiguration.
I hurry past the nova, its face blurred by trails of smoke drifting up from the incense smouldering on the altar. Have more soldiers died in the escalating War? A distant tragedy is not enough to dim the joy of new possibilities. Despite my skin, I’m enough of a friend to Jamila to be an honoured guest at her celebration…it’s almost enough to make me want to believe again.
‘Maybe you aren’t a fraud,’ I say to the face on the nova. In the dimness of the smoke, I imagine a faint smile curves those sad, wooden lips and I hear the memory of Sub-Prioress Dalia echo I love you, I love you, I love…
I hurry away from the sound, out into the garden. I must tell Grace but, before I do, I must buy some white roses to put at the feet of the angel who guards her ashes. Outside the court gates that overlook the bright turquoise sea, today as calm as a deep, deep lake, the old crone still sits and sells her flowers. She is not alone.
Enoch is with her, his back to me, his beautiful hands shoved into his back pockets so the faded denim of his jeans pulls tight across his buttocks. His long hair, loose this morning, trails over the back of his jacket to fall between two angel wings, cracked gold and white where the paint and the leather has worn with age, or use, or both, and I am assailed with the headiness of hope.
Enoch who calls to me. I evade him, if I can, although the small court grounds make it difficult. His aura of danger usually makes me keep my distance but, on this day that offers so much, I watch him as he laughs at the old crone’s words.
His head rolls back. A slender silver nova dangles from his ear and glints in the sun as he takes a hand from his pocket to sweep it over her wrinkled cheek. He answers her in an ancient language, one I cannot understand and one that flows around me and over me and into me. It entices me to the outer edges of safety, there, at the court gate, too close to where he stands. I almost disregard the dangers of believing I can savour what he offers.
I try to ignore the thirst he rouses, deep in the love-parched plains of my essence. Jamila’s friendship is the pinnacle of any love I aspire to. Yet, I ache for more. I want to throw off my past, shed it as a snake sheds its skin, but, like Sub-Prioress Dalia, love too is a betrayer.
Softer emotions have had no place in my life. I clamp them down, hard, as I learnt to do in the past decade, but to no avail. I can’t stop yearning for that long slim hand to touch me with want, with need, for who I am beyond the skin, for who I was before I was the Pale One.
An innocent child, neither innocent nor child any longer, but a woman who cannot be a woman. One who can never be other than what I am. An outcast, an alien in a world that despises difference. A world that talks of forgiveness and love, the Spirit King’s love, which is as big a lie as the love Sub-Prioress Dalia showered me with, in the days when I believed.
The old crone sees me at the gate. She nods in my direction and murmurs to Enoch. He turns and it’s too late to bolt. His smile lights up his face, much the same as Sub-Prioress Dalia’s face did when she had read one of Sub-Prioress Kapera’s notes.
‘Come.’ He beckons me and the tattooed L-O-V-E flashes its untruth.
‘Where to?’ I ask. I do not move from the iron bars that separate us.
‘To the beach,’ he replies, and urges me to join him with a flick of his wrist. ‘You’ve never been there.’
‘I haven’t,’ I agree. ‘But I can’t go.’
He raises his eyebrows in surprise. ‘Why not?’
There is no simple answer to that simple question, so I shrug my shoulders in an eloquent reply. How can I tell him I cannot trust what he offers? Jamila offers me the only acceptance I need: my first chance to dance with life on the day she marries her beloved.
‘I have to work,’ I say. ‘After I buy some flowers for Grace.’ With finality, I add, ‘Anyway, the gate’s locked.’
‘No, it’s not,’ Prior Ajani urges from behind me. ‘Go with Enoch. He’ll take care of you.’
The two men share a cloaked glance. I cannot begin to guess what they share.
‘Thanks, Prior,’ Enoch murmurs and inclines his head so his eyes shimmer with layer upon layer of mystery that pin me where I stand. I am lost, my spirit in grave danger, when he says, ‘Come with me, Lulu.’
I shake my head. ‘Jamila needs me,’ I say. I turn to walk back to the court office.
Prior Ajani blocks my way. ‘Not as much as you think,’ he says. He takes my arm in a podgy clasp. Some angry part of me recognises that, with muscles honed over a decade of hard labour, I can break his grip with ease. Instead, I stand there and let him turn me back to face what I try to evade. He clicks the gate latch open with his free hand and swings the iron bars out of my path. ‘There,’ he beams, as he pushes me over the threshold, away from Jamila, and into the world that awaits me beyond the court gardens. ‘The gate is open after all.’
I hover between anger and fear. I harness the ripples that tense my muscles in defensive readiness and tell myself that this court is different to the other places I’ve lived. Here I have no enemies; in this simple world that pulses with the slow rhythm of ordinary lives and their small pleasures, I have only friends who would not hurt me.
‘When do you want me back?’ I ask.
‘Take your time! Take your time!’ Prior Ajani encourages, clutching my arm as Enoch steps forward and takes my other arm.
For a millisecond, I hang between them, as the Spirit King hangs on his nova, a conduit for the union of their essence. The force of it makes me sway; dazzles me with a flash of golden light until Prior Ajani lets go and the earth settles beneath my feet.
‘You deserve some rest, child,’ he says. ‘You’ve worked too hard.’
I’m unsure if he talks of the few short weeks I’ve been at St Jerome’s, or if he talks of the rest of my life.
• • •
As Jamila promised, the ocean is a balm. Through the tempo of the waves, and the melodic cry of gulls careening overhead, I become aware of Enoch’s heat. His face is beyond beauty and I wonder: would a man’s lips taste as sweet as those of Sub-Prioress Dalia?
The thrum of his body is so close to mine. All that keeps us apart is a slice of air, thick with the promise that we can breach our separate selves. That, in an instant, we can be as complete as the sea. But, like each drop of water that makes the ocean whole, he is separate and silent, and so am I.
Yet, in that silence, my simmering anger at the Spirit King’s abandonment hears the ocean’s song and is soothed. It quiets, and settles back, as I squint at Enoch out of the corner of my eye. The gap between us is small, so small. Such a little movement to close the distance between us and find what I seek. I remember the Spirit King, enduring on his nova, and almost ask him to give me the courage to move.
But once before I believed the Spirit King had heard my plea. I was wrong then, and now I am too afraid to ask.
Chapter 17
Jamila
“The devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape.”
In the Zero breakfast bar, with the lack of prices on the menu and the subdued clink of cutlery tapping against fine white porcelain attesting to i
ts exclusivity, Jamila sits across the table from Chuki Samanya and rejoices. Her Spirit King has returned. The same benevolent Spirit King who sent her Dawud, and Prior Ajani and Lulu—yes, even the strange transparent Lulu—has returned to show her how bright her hopes are.
She wonders if it’s a sign that her unhappiness is at an end. That, of all the women in a world more affluent even than Dawud’s, the wife of her ezomo, her downfall, is her redeemer.
‘Thanks for breakfast,’ she says and does not hear how her fervour filters through the bland platitude.
‘My dear,’ Chuki says, ‘I should thank you! One is so bored with the same faces, the same gossip!’ She reaches across the table and smoothes Jamila’s hand, and her uncertainties, with butter soft gentleness. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she smiles. ‘You’ll get used to it.’
The promise implicit in the words comforts Jamila and she relaxes under the steady, soft caress. ‘I like it when you speak so honestly,’ she says, and strokes back with a brave, clumsy gesture. ‘I can learn from you.’
‘There’s not much you need to learn,’ says Chuki, ‘but I’ll teach you what I can.’ She laughs, a chocolate-dark laugh, heavy and sweet, a contrast to her slender form, as elegant as ever, though it’s early.
A part of Jamila preens. What does this woman recognise in her that she cannot discern for herself? Can she see the real Jamila Johnson, buried beneath the years of penitential despair?
‘Daren misled me!’ Chuki says.
‘Daren?’ Jamila swallows a sip of juice too fast and chokes on the name. She doesn’t want his image here. She doesn’t want this new possibility spoiled if Chuki discovers what stains her spirit, the stain called Daren Samanya: this woman’s husband and her ezomo.
‘My husband.’ Chuki breaks off a chunk of honey-dripping croissant and bites into it with neat, sharp teeth. ‘Mmm. Delicious,’ she murmurs. She looks at Jamila, a heavy gaze redolent with unabashed sensual enjoyment. It reminds Jamila of that pristine white bed, the one she lay on as she wondered what Daren and Chuki Samanya did in the gloom of the clouded nights.
‘He admires you,’ Chuki says.
Jamila’s hands jerk and the juice spills out of the fragile crystal tumbler, over the white, white tablecloth and drips onto the cold marble floor. She gasps with embarrassment and a horrible, forbidden pleasure leaps and roars deep within her.
‘Me?’ she says.
‘You resisted him,’ Chuki says. With an imperious gesture, she summons a waiter to clear up the disorder. ‘In his bad old days, when women lay flat every time he asked, you resisted him.’
‘I resisted him?’ Jamila echoes, the slap, slap of heated flesh under a silver moon loud in her memory. Other memories rush in. She sees herself turn away from Samanya in the months that follow; she stays away from the parties he attends and she refuses to take his calls. All her resistance to him in the years between then and now flood her mind and transfigure the truth she’s lived with for so long. ‘I did!’ she says, a new revelation lightening the load she carries in her essence. ‘I did resist him!’
‘You did.’
‘I found it hard,’ Jamila discloses. She remembers the long nights afterwards when all the pleasure she’d found with Dawud dissolved into an expiation of awkward grunts and a sweaty, restless need never satisfied. ‘To resist him.’
‘Daren respects you for that,’ Samanya’s wife says and finishes the last of her croissant with a stylish, greedy snap. ‘That interests me. You interest me.’ She wipes her fingers clean on the white damask serviette, and slides a complex glance at Jamila, half a challenge, half an appeal, as she adds, ‘Do you think we can be friends? If you want to be friends with me.’
If she wants to? To hide the heady rush that consumes her, Jamila toys with her pearls, the ones Granny Zahra had given her. One of the beautiful people, one of the perfect people—the daughter of one of the richest men in the Old Sea City, never mind that she’s also the wife of Jamila’s ezomo!—is sitting here asking Jamila to be her friend. She breathes her thanks to the Spirit King who wrought this miracle: even though Dawud has not yet married her, she is reborn. She is one of the golden ones; one of the privileged with their perfect lives and perfect dreams and she has overcome her painful, shameful past.
‘Jamila?’ Chuki Samanya calls her name with an eager, enquiring edge, one that fills Jamila with excitement.
‘Friends…you…yes!’
She shivers with a new rapture. Even though she lost The Battle of the Balcony, Jamila now believes she won The War. She defeated her ezomo. For years, she’d thought fear devoured her every time she turned away from Samanya. Thanks to her new friend Chuki, she understands that fear can transfigure into resistance, until an ezomo is no longer an ezomo, but only a shabby memory of a small error.
‘Chuki,’ she says, setting the past with all its pain and remorse free. ‘I’d love to be your friend!’ In her delight, she dismisses the shadow of triumph in the other woman’s ardent gaze.
• • •
Jamila arrives late at St Jerome’s. The Pale One is there, already hard at work.
‘Oh,’ Jamila says. She’d forgotten that they’ve fallen into the pattern of spending time together each morning. ‘I hope you didn’t come in early today.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Lulu says, with a touch of her old reserve. A spurt of regret sours Jamila’s happiness.
‘It does. I should have called you to tell you I’d be late.’
‘Did you enjoy your breakfast with your friend?’ the Pale One asks.
‘Who told you where I was?’
‘Prior Ajani.’
‘Good,’ Jamila says. ‘You didn’t have to worry.’ She lets her elation gush out in a brilliant smile. ‘Lulu, you’ll never believe what happened!’
Lulu stands up and pours Jamila a cup of coffee. She brings it to Jamila’s desk and, her face softening, says, ‘Tell me.’
‘That dinner…the one that Dawud wanted me to go to…’
Lulu nods in encouragement and Jamila continues. ‘I never had time to tell you before, but it was awful to start with—’ She breaks off to sip her drink and her gaze glitters with dreams. The Pale One stays silent, as she always does, and lets Jamila set the pace of the conversation.
‘I behaved like a fool!’ She grimaces. ‘Like a scared little girl from the country.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ Lulu says.
Jamila gives a low laugh. ‘If you could have seen me…I humiliated myself dreadfully!’ She puts her mug down and stretches half over her desk, craning her neck towards the door leading to the nave. There’s no sight of the others, so she clutches the girl’s arm, surprised the skin is so warm when it looks so different to her own. ‘But, Lulu,’ she says, with a passion she doesn’t often reveal. ‘I did it! I salvaged enough from that disaster to make it.’
‘Make what?’
‘Acceptance. To have those beautiful people accept me.’
Lulu doesn’t answer immediately. ‘That’s important to you?’ she asks.
‘For Dawud’s sake,’ Jamila is quick to say. ‘His business is so important to him. The pharmacy chain has belonged to the Templeton family for generations and he has a responsibility to keep it successful. We have to network.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Lulu says. ‘Networking.’ She nods as if she understands what Jamila means, when Jamila herself doesn’t really believe what she says, for her pleasure is not about Dawud, but about victory over her ezomo.
‘Was that guy there?’ Lulu adds.
‘Samanya?’
‘Yeah, if that’s his name. The one who bothered you before.’
Jamila leans back in her chair. She stretches her arms, hands clasped outwards. ‘Oh yes,’ she says. ‘He was there alright, but I handled him!’ She jerks her hands free and the release of her tension echoes in her contented smile. ‘He’s no threat any longer. He wasn’t ever a big threat. Maybe Dawud was right all along—I overreacted.’
Lulu fr
owns and tilts her head. There is no expression on her face as she asks, ‘Are you sure?’
The Pale One’s uncertainty does not discourage Jamila. Her hands flowing through the air, Jamila tells her of how she stared a Levid in the eye, and didn’t flinch. Of how she freed herself from the last vestiges of her ezomo and, at last, she tells her of Chuki Samanya, her new friend.
‘…and I was so thrilled when she ‘phoned last night and asked me to join her for breakfast.’ She jumps up, as excited as any young girl who has found a new idol, and hauls her handbag out of the cupboard where she’d stored it.
‘You’d like her, Lulu,’ she says, to be kind, for Lulu would never mix with people like Chuki Samanya. She shows her a photograph, cut out of a glossy magazine, of the woman, reed-like, and elegant as a mannequin.
‘She’s pretty,’ Lulu says and adds loyally, ‘but not as pretty as you.’
‘Oh, Lulu!’ Jamila dismisses her words. As the bustle in the corridor announces the court gardener arriving for work, she adds quickly, ‘Chuki asked me for breakfast tomorrow.’ She grimaces with disappointment. ‘But I’m supposed to take the proofs of my invitations to the printers!’
‘I…I’ll take them,’ Lulu offers and rubs her arm where the half-moon imprints of Jamila’s nails show. ‘If you like. If the breakfast is important to you.’
Jamila hesitates. What will the stationery salesman think when Lulu, with her outlandish appearance and her abrasive ways, walks through the door? But, she’ll never need the printers after the wedding, where Chuki Samanya…oh, she opens a completely new future. ‘That would be fabulous, my dear.’ When Lulu blinks in surprise at the endearment, Jamila realises she’s already fallen into Chuki Samanya’s habits. ‘Will you be able to come home with me to pick them up? We can have a cup of tea and I’ll tell you what changes the printer must make.’
A hint of vulnerability, of loss and longing deep in the Pale One’s eyes, surprises Jamila. It reminds her of when she came to the Old Sea City, and prods her into remembering her vow of kindness. ‘You can stay for dinner,’ she says.
