by Judy Croome
I burn with a desire for love to jumpstart all I’d thought long dead, the truth trapped in a past I believed in. But can I trust myself and turn to the hope of a future I can believe in?
‘Jamila. She’s the one who knows how to love. Not me. Never me,’ I say.
‘Go to her,’ he says and retreats behind the altar. I leave in silence and hear the scrape of a match. The smell of the buffalo-thorn curls its way after me as thin, fragrant smoke rises above the soft rustle of Prior Ajani’s petitions for those left dead by The War.
• • •
Jamila is alone in the office, her back to the door as she unseals the tape around her box.
‘Where’s Enoch?’ I ask. I startle her, for she jerks the box cutter and slashes the lid.
‘In the garden,’ she says. She arches over the box as if to protect it. Jamila doesn’t mention that she found me on my back in the nave, but she’s upset, her mouth tense around the edges. Laying the cutter down with a clatter, she removes the half-opened box and places it out of the way between her desk and her cupboard. ‘I’ll finish that later,’ she says. ‘We need to start work.’
I want to apologise. To return to our usual friendliness. But I’m embarrassed and not sure how to breach the sternness of her faith. We begin work, silent for hours, except for normal office noises.
The silence isn’t like the silences we shared before, or even those I share with Enoch on the days Jamila is with Chuki Samanya. The air is dismal. Each time I glance across she is ripe with relentless disapproval. I try not to search Jamila’s face for signs of friendship. When our eyes meet, I give a cautious smile and hope the old Jamila will peep out of the brittle-green gaze. But she remains lost until lunchtime.
‘I’m leaving,’ she says. ‘I’ll be back late. If Prior Ajani asks, tell him Dawud called last night. He wants the pharmacy to send more medical supplies.’
‘Okay,’ I say, as if we’d never stopped speaking. ‘I’ll answer the telephone if you want.’
‘Thanks,’ she says, with a flicker of her old smile. I blink in relief. As she digs in her drawer for her car keys, she grumbles, ‘I don’t have time for this today. There’s so much else to do. You’d think Dawud would be more considerate when he knows how busy I am finalising the wedding.’ She’s missing Dawud and pre-wedding nerves make her peevish.
‘Don’t rush,’ I say. ‘I’ll take care of the office.’
She nods and gives me another brief, tense smile. I grin back, relieved we’re friends again, but she’s already disappeared through the door. I stay where I am, the half-opened cardboard box she has to unpack a palpable presence in the room. What, I ask myself, what if I do it? Will I please her? Will I please her enough to forgive my small, foolish transgression?
Without any further thought, I push my chair back and hurry over to lift the box onto her desk. I slice through the tape then pause. Is what I’m doing right? But, as our friendship has grown, Jamila has often trusted me with tasks such as this. So I peel back the lid, all the grimness of the day forgotten.
WINSTON’S PRINTERS.
That’s the name stamped across the tissue paper crusting the box’s contents: Jamila’s invitations have arrived.
I’m as excited as if I were the bride. I lift the flimsy layers to reveal row after row of exquisite cream envelopes, embossed with delicate gold letters that curl gracefully. I comb my fingers across the tops of the envelopes and sigh with happiness. Somewhere in here, I exult, is my invitation. My first-ever invitation, a doorway into a new life.
I never earned much in prison and I don’t earn much here at court, but when one has no one to spend one’s money on, it soon accumulates. I’ve already bought Jamila’s gift, and a special outfit to wear. Shopping is a chore. The curious stares of the people I meet make it a torture. I avoid it as much as I can, except for necessities, but for Jamila, I ignored all the rudeness.
When I loved Dalia, I was a child, a penniless Unwanted. I gave her bunches of wild flowers, or roses filched from the same bushes she had tended with such care. But to hold my purse, thick with money, added to my joy as I spent my free time in a search for the right gift for my beloved friend Jamila. I found a delicate rose bowl, made of real silver and more expensive than I’d planned; it is the perfect gift.
Sometimes at night, after I’ve turned out the lights, I imagine myself, dressed in my new silk suit. I sit in the court pitha and watch Jamila walk down the aisle. I dream of the reception hall where Jamila, rapt with joy, stands next to her Dawud as they welcome their guests, their friends and me.
In my imagination, I see her face as I give her the gift.
‘Oh, you shouldn’t have, Lulu!’ she’ll say and bend to kiss my cheek.
I’ll smile with pleasure and move to my seat, a guest at a lavish celebration of life. A person rather than a Pale One. I’ll meet Jamila’s other friends and, perhaps if I’m lucky, there’ll be one or two as kind as she is, blind to my skin and happy to let me call them by name.
The contents of this flimsy box hold that dream of friendship and acceptance. Unable to resist the lure, I flip through the envelopes, past the A’s, the B’s, until I come to the L’s. Although I search and search, I do not find one in my name.
My heart squeezes into numbness, then beats into life. On an occasion such as this wedding, the invitations will be formal. I forage through them until I find the initial of my surname. No one else in the world has ever been as excited over such an ordinary event. It may be ordinary, but to me, this invitation represents an end to the tyranny of my skin colour and the beginning of a new era. People will come to know me for who I am and not what they see.
There is no envelope.
A mistake, I tell myself. Or I’ve missed it in my hurry. I search another time. From the A’s all the way to the end of the Z’s. I pass over the invitation with “Prior Ajani” written in elegant French script.
Nothing.
I can’t stop the tremors. The invitation is there—somewhere. It must be. Jamila promised. She promised, and she won’t go back on a promise to a friend. Not Jamila. She’s too good a person. Her allegiance is too strong. Somewhere, I remember, there’s a commandment written in the Eden Book: Thou shalt not lie.
Shaking my head to deny my thoughts, I console myself that, with such a large number of invitations, there will inevitably be mistakes. That my invitation is one of those errors is unfortunate. But the pinpricks of an old rage uncoil within me. The good Sub-Prioress Dalia lied when she said she loved me, that the Spirit King loved me. Why not Jamila, when she said she was my friend?
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Jamila speaks harshly and bumps me aside as she hauls her box in close to her body. ‘That’s private!’
‘You’re back sooner than I expected,’ I say. I am as cold as the shadows I have returned to, the shadows where love is an impossibility. Even friendship, it seems, does not belong in this bitter, lonely place I call my life.
‘I’m not staying. I came to collect the list of supplies Dawud wants. I left them on my desk. Why were you scratching in my box?’
This is Jamila, I tell myself and I remember how secretive she was before we became friends. She kept herself closed. She never let me see what she worked on. She never opened her cupboard door wide in case I saw what was in there.
‘I’m helping you.’ I speak as one would to a nervous cat. The mildness of my tone calms her.
‘Oh,’ she says and looks as foolish as I did earlier, when she found me spread-eagled before the altar.
I hesitate, but suspicion cuts into me. I say, ‘I picked up some mistakes in the invitations.’
Arrested, her hand hovers over the tissue paper I’d laid aside in neat piles. ‘There can’t be! Chuki and I have to deliver them after work.’
I shrug, and wait, and the coldness spreads into every corner of my essence.
‘What mistakes?’ she asks and, in a rush, gathers the tissue paper I’d removed to replace it haphazar
dly in the box. Why does she act guilty?
‘Not all the names on the guest list I typed have had their invitations printed.’
Jamila has it all, I marvel. Even when she blushes, she’s attractive.
‘How many are missing?’ she asks. As if she doesn’t already know.
‘One,’ I say, and let the silence drag out until the coldness seeps out of me and into the room in tendrils that reach for Jamila and freeze the blush on her cheeks. ‘Mine.’
I wait, as I had waited for Dalia to lift her gaze from the body of her dead lover when they took me away. Jamila doesn’t disappoint me; she is stronger than Dalia.
‘There’s an explanation for that,’ she says.
She straightens her shoulders and fusses with the lid of the box, sliding furtive glances at me. The dank smell of betrayal, which I had come to believe I would never smell here, in this placid little court, chokes me.
‘Chuki says—’
‘It’s not Chuki’s wedding,’ I interrupt harshly. ‘It’s yours.’
‘But…you can’t want to come!’
‘I do.’
‘You don’t know anyone.’
‘I’ll make new friends.’
‘People will stare at you.’
‘I’m used to it.’
‘Don’t be like this, please, Lulu,’ she says, hurt and bewildered and somehow sure of her innocence. ‘Please don’t be hurt! I don’t want to hurt anyone. I’m a kind person!’
She believes it. I hear it in her tone, aggrieved that I’m the cause of what makes her look less than her image of herself.
I give up the fight. What is there left to fight for? I lost my friend Jamila long ago, for she never existed except in my hope.
‘I know,’ I say, more tired, more defeated even than when I lost my Dalia.
‘I’m not an unkind person,’ she says. ‘I did it for you, Lulu. You don’t want all of Dawud’s friends to stare at you like a freak in a circus. You told me you hate it when people stare and that’s exactly what Chuki says will happen if you come.’
I ignore her and trudge to the door. I must flee before the ice thaws and my rage escapes the frozen prison of my heart.
‘Do you want to come?’ Her uncertain question stops me.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I was being polite.’ The almost comic relief that floods her face turns my laugh bitter.
She says more but I am already running. Past the goddamn nave and its goddamn false promises of the beauty of a new day, coloured full of life. I ignore it all: the startled face of Prior Ajani, the Spirit King-mask on the wooden nova and the ubiquitous smell of incense.
I slam out the doors and into the rainstorm. What happened to the bright new dawn? I stand there and gasp as the warm rain mingles with my tears. Disoriented for a moment, I hesitate.
I remember the relic of Grace. I start to run again, my clumsy legs weighted with hatred and rage at one more betrayal. I crash through the gate, into the garden of remembrance and stumble. As I fall, I clutch the serene marble angel that decorates the ground where Grace Obinna Templeton’s ashes lie. The old round scar in my palm aches with the contact.
‘Why?’ I sob. ‘Why?’
The wind brings the storm in off the sea and sucks my cry away. It licks my face with raindrops and washes me clean as it soaks into the depths of my essence. Huddled at the foot of Grace’s angel, I succumb to the pain. I have no more rage to hold it at bay. The power of the lightening that sizzles and thunders overhead has stripped away the heat of my anger and left only the oblivion of another loss.
This painful emptiness, which holds me in its grip, must be what death is like. A comfort. Almost peaceful in a billowy limbo. My grief passes its zenith and here, curled beside Grace’s ashes, wrapped in wet grass as warm as a mother’s womb, I enter a liminal world where I hurt no longer. Grace’s monument fades in and out, in and out, as my vision dissolves and I float…float…I hover on the threshold to that other world and leave the pain behind, in the world where once my heart used to beat with faith and hope and love. In the pressing silence that is my shield, my heartbeat fades away. I hear it go: THUMP…thump…thump.
I hear a soothing lullaby, and I hear an old crone murmur, in an ancient language, that I can trust this promise.
‘Luyando,’ the lullaby sighs.
So far away. Almost inaudible.
‘Luyando.’
Enoch calls again. Heavy with the lassitude of a new peace I flicker my lashes. Shut them. The light on the other side is too bright, too white. Enoch is behind me, somewhere, closer and clearer. But I’m tired. Too tired to suffer anymore. Let me sink into the void of the light. Let it pull me across the hazy threshold and into that refuge they call the Sky Palace.
‘Come back, Luyando.’ He is grim and my chest hurts as he pumps and shakes me loose from the folds of the velvet white light that calls. ‘You’re not meant to die from a broken heart! Come back!’
He is so urgent, so demanding, I renew the struggle. My heart stutters in its slow descent and then starts to beat rapidly, perspiration popping out on my skin and mingling with the easing rain.
Enoch leans back on his heels. He removes a hand from my chest to swipe rainwater off his face and the sleeve of his black leather jacket captures the rain in perfect droplets. Each drop clings until it can cling no longer. Then it, too, surrenders and releases and, as it splashes into the puddle at his feet, transforms back into that from which it came: it is one with its source. How I envy that droplet the safety of its surrender!
‘Go away,’ I mumble and roll over on my side, away from him. ‘I’m happy like this.’
He tugs me around. ‘You are happy,’ he agrees. ‘But you don’t know it yet.’
I swot him away, hurting my hands, scoured open as I tripped over Grace’s headstone. I wiggle myself upright to lean back against the marble angel and draw my feet under me. The rain has stopped and the radiant Garden of Remembrance offers me a new freedom.
‘Happiness is a lie. Like friendship.’ Exhausted, I make no effort to hide my bitterness.
Enoch dabs at the blood that oozes out of the old round scar in my palm. The letters of his tattoos blur as he works. L-O-V-E over P-E-A-C-E. P-E-A-C-E over L-O-V-E.
‘That’s a lie too.’ I jerk away. ‘There is no love in this world. Or peace. It’s all selfish lies. Look at Jamila.’
‘Yes,’ he agrees, ‘find the truth in Jamila. Move over.’ He pokes my shoulder until I shift so he, too, can sit at the foot of Grace’s angel. ‘Before you look to Jamila, you must look at yourself. Find the truth in there.’ A long slender finger, adorned with a tattooed “P” taps my chest, still heaving as my heartbeat settles and I suck in sweet breaths of rain-washed air, perfumed with the scent of the white roses that lie scattered around.
My head tips back. The marble is cold and damp, but I ignore it and close my eyes to reach for my rage. Here, with Enoch to share the solidness of Grace’s angel, I can remember how angry I am with Jamila, with the world and with the Spirit King. But I can’t find it inside me, where my hatred has lurked for so long. So, with cool logic, I remind myself of why I should hate Jamila.
‘She calls herself a believer, but she’s a hypocrite.’
‘It’s a wall,’ Enoch says. ‘She’s built it to shore herself up against her ezomo.’
‘She calls it allegiance.’
‘It’s her difference to you,’ he replies.
‘She’s an ambitious social climber.’
‘It’s her hope,’ Enoch says, ‘for a future better than her past.’
‘She’s a liar! She breaks promises!’ The anger and the pain make a sluggish attempt to claw back to life.
‘She calls it love,’ he says. ‘But she has no idea what love is. Is that a Great Error? Not to know the love that endures? If it is,’ his impartial sea-grey gaze does not leave my face, ‘we should all be doomed.’
I’m tumbled from the tower of my loneliness by a bolt of lightning as fierce as
those that have recently swept in off the sea.
I see in what he says much of what I’ve seen in those that I’ve called both friend and foe. I am Jamila; I am Dalia; I am all those who flee and curse me as the Levid. My immutable bond with them all is that I, too, have seen them as different, when the only real difference is whether the view was theirs or mine. Nova or grace, Enoch said earlier and, until now, I’ve chosen to see the nova and not the grace.
I sigh and bend my head forward onto my knees as I glance sideways at Enoch. He smiles, with nothing but love in his face, and sweeps me away to a place I’ve never been before.
‘You’ve got it, my beloved,’ he whispers, and he rests his forehead on the crown of my head. ‘You’ve got it.’
‘What?’ I choke, fearful of the richness in this moment I do not fully understand. ‘What have I got?’
‘Love,’ he says. ‘You have found love, Luyando.’
He pushes himself to his feet and dusts away bits of mud and grass. ‘Don’t go,’ I say, afraid I’ll never see him again.
‘I won’t leave yet,’ he says. ‘I have to fetch Zahra.’
‘Oh.’ I chew the inside of my lip, my new companion doubt. ‘How do I know?’
‘Know what?’
‘When to love instead of to hate.’
‘You’ll know. Look with—’
‘—with my inner eye,’ I interrupt and rummage for a weak grin.
‘That’s right. Your heart’s voice,’ he says, ‘will keep you free from the differences which have never existed except in our minds.’
He throws his head back and laughs, as he did with the old crone, his black hair loose, the silver nova in his ear glinting in the sun as it slides out from behind the intermittent storm clouds to bathe him in beautiful golden light.
He is a vision of the new day I have longed for all my life. Only this time, I can choose the colour of my freedom. I wipe away the last remnants of my tears and see my future before me: doubt or belief; despair or hope; hatred or love.
Which will I choose for the rest of my life?
