by Sam Tranum
The young man drives them to the local beach. It is a trial to watch him parcelled into the car, the young man sweeping him from one seat to the other, one arm under his bottom, the other curved around his back. She watches him belt himself in. She sits in the back with a straw hat. She has changed into her swimming costume and now wears a sundress. Her arms feel flabby, her skin mottled. She is self-conscious. The dress is fairly long. She has brought flip-flops.
In the car, as they drive, she wants to cry and he turns around and sees her. She places her cheek on his shoulder and he cups her other cheek with his hand, which is cool. There is a snatch of his old smell between his fingers, deep where the skin forks apart. Her tears finish and she pulls away. He looks out the window. He has bundled his hair into a knitted cap.
Though the car park is full, his driver heads directly to the sandy entrance to the beach. She sees the water glittering, waves crashing, hears reggae from massive speakers. Helpers rush to the vehicle, standing in a circle when the driver lifts out the wheelchair, pulls the arms apart, placing a printed cushion on the seat sling. She sits there, watching him scoop up her old lover, arrange his trousered legs. She gets out. The crowd of hawkers and ragamuffins jostles around her, hands extended with peeled oranges, cinnamon gum, nail clippers. Ahead, the young man has tilted the chair and pulls him as a donkey with a cart. She looks at him and he is laughing at her grim face, telling her to get a move on.
They settle under a beach umbrella plugged into the sand outside one of the bars, a shack really. It is a busy afternoon but a table has somehow been freed for them. She senses he comes here a lot. With friends from the old days, not family members, the people he caroused with. Mostly men. She knows that the women who interested him all became lovers. Many would be weary of him now. She senses he also comes here alone and likes to strike up conversations, offering a beer to the coconut boy or a Danish pilot. She remembers his world views were almost sensual. He chiefly represented himself.
One of the young waitresses gives him a warm kiss on the cheek and his arm grasps her back, fingers in a star. She wonders if he can still have an erection. The girl is ripe and very dark.
They are served beers. The young driver has disappeared. Later she sees him standing under an awning alone, sipping Fanta.
‘Would you like a swim?’
‘Not yet, not really.’
She doesn’t want him to see her body. Before, they used to glide together. Hours were spent naked, examining each other’s orifices, plunging until pain or fear or eclipse brought them back. Their intimacy has always haunted her. She wonders what he has done with other women.
‘You’re afraid I’ll check out your bum?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Like to see mine?’ He laughs. ‘You know, I’m going to make love to you before you leave this place.’
She shakes her head slowly.
They would always have the blueprints for each other’s bodies.
Before she is too drunk, she takes her towel down to the water’s edge. She needs to pee and figures she’ll do it in the sea. She wonders how long he will last after two beers. Maybe that is why the young man is waiting there. She doesn’t know how it works yet. She takes off her dress and wades in, dunking herself in the water’s cold clasp. Tropical, but the sea is always freezing. Ahead, the waves crash down and few people have gone out that far. She pees, a hot cloud on her leg. She was once caught in a rip here. Another time, a turd floated by her shoulder. She breaststrokes a little.
Refreshed, she walks back to where they were sitting, but his wheelchair is gone. She looks about. He can’t have moved far. Then she sees the young man pulling hard, flicking up sand, the wheelchair tilted behind him. The chair is swung around and parked. She feels like embracing him, she knows the alcohol and drowsy sun are conspiring. She wonders if it is still illegal to go on the beach at night. They were encircled by soldiers once, down by one of the fancy hotels. The soldiers pulled down his trunks and played with him, laughing at his fine, spent cock.
The young man walks off to his shady spot under an awning. He stands there squinting at the surf.
‘How was the water? I’d like to have a swim with you. In the morning could be good.’
When he called to tell her what had happened, he said he wanted to buy her a plane ticket. He said he had to see her. He asked her about dates. She could not speak. Eventually she told him some dates and was able to put off work and foster out her animals. It was a long, fretful trip, partly because he had rewired her all over again and she was back in his orbit. The keenest, most stringent thing she had ever done was to leave him. But he had spoken so plainly. She had never heard him speak so plainly.
She wipes the rim of the green bottle, chinks hers with his.
‘Let’s sit awhile,’ he says.
The light softens after its bright peak. The day ends early here: it is dark by six o’clock. The sun seeps into her legs. She feels her skin tight and dry, wet behind the knees. Sand covers her shins. The chair is uncomfortable and she shifts from one buttock to the other. Her costume has dried quickly. She sees him looking at her arms. She covers her slight belly with her sarong. He has never worn sunglasses, his eyes have always stared at the world, even in the hottest places. She noticed reading glasses on the table at the house.
A hawker comes up to them with a tub on his head piled high with useless things. He stares at the man’s headdress, then points to a shred of blue hair-netting that the girls use here when they scrub their skins. The seller has calves like yams and removes the contraption from his head, placing it on the sand and bringing forth socks, soap, chalk for ants. Do they not want any of these fine tings? But again, he points to the bright blue netting. He buys it with some greasy notes and gives it to her. It is a coarse blue spider web.
‘A gift,’ he says.
‘Thank you.’
He calls behind him to the ripe waitress who comes out laughing, her tray flat on her hip. The young woman curls her arm around his neck and their faces are close. She used to feel so scalded when other women came up to him. But now she identifies this pulse, it feels innocuous. She looks away. The driver has stepped out from under the awning and is speaking on his mobile phone. People are beginning to trail back to the car park. A tiny girl with masses of beaded plaits wears sagging swimmers and sucks her thumb. Her mother has deep-blue tattoos sunken into her shoulders, one laced across her chest. Other people have just arrived. Two men in wide trousers and printed shirts, two girls with tidy hair. They set out a little way from the speakers then drop to the sand in a group. No hand-holding, no kisses. There are still religious people here, with staunch values.
The waitress leaves, her broad bare feet kick up sand as she sways. He has bought a Guinness for the hawker.
She glances at his beige trousers and the socks and canvas shoes someone has fitted onto his feet. He looks like a slim girl wearing cast-offs. He always wore jeans before. Jeans everywhere. Through deserts. Bare-chested in the house when she was drenched with heat. She tries to imagine him naked. His slack upper body tapering to the useless twins of his legs. She remembers taking him in her mouth, stroking his limbs. She remembers the weight of him, she can feel the different textures of him on her tongue.
‘Perhaps we should go to the house now. I have a couple of things I have to do.’
He says this as though he has forgotten an appointment. The young man comes over, manoeuvring him through the parade of people headed home. Their vehicle is at the head of the car park and again she watches painfully as his body is transferred. She will have to get used to this. He looks tired. On the way home he does not speak and she feels as though it was a mistake to have come here. He stares over the neighbourhoods. At the house, his chair is smacked apart again and his body is lifted and he is wheeled to the stairs. The young man carries him up into the house.
She steps out of the car into the yard. Children and mistresses have gone someplace else and sh
e smells smoke from a charcoal cooker. The walls of the house are brown with grime and the palm trees are pushed deep into the dirt before the back fence. She walks over and touches one. Looks up to the clutch of coconuts at the top, genitals under a skirt. It’s been a while since she’s had sex. She supposes he can see it on her. She walks over to the next tree and flattens her hands around it, feeling the dry ridges and ruts. She remembers how he made her lie on the rooftop and describe clouds, a thing she’d hadn’t done since she was a kid. It never rang true – she knew his childhood had been stolen – his delight in unmarred things.
She still doesn’t know what she should ask him. Why she is even here. She looks up, imagining he is leaning bare-chested over the railing, smoking, looking rangy, hungry for her. She hears a sound from the shower block at the back. A toilet is flushed and a squat, messy-looking woman walks out and back into the house, wiping her hands on her shift.
Upstairs, the door to his bedroom is closed and she hears water running. She wants to shower but doesn’t know if there is enough pressure for two of them to run at the same time. She leaves her things in the spare room, goes out onto the veranda and rubs the sand from her shins with a towel. She is still wearing her swimming costume. She can smell food cooking downstairs in the kitchen. He has always had mediocre, cranky cooks who would leave after big fights with everybody, usually involving theft. She doesn’t care for food right now and doubts she will this evening. On the table there is a carafe of water and two glasses, one with droplets inside. She drinks.
There is still no sound from his bedroom. She knew there would be a lot of dead time here, when he would rest or have other things to do. She has brought work with her, but she doesn’t feel much like it. She sits outside drinking water. The neighbourhood is quiet. They were all stylish homes once.
The young man comes out of the bedroom and closes the door. It’s hard to read his face. It is as though he embodies what has happened, even more than the paralysed man in the room, and when he leaves he takes away slabs of the tragedy. She is glad he is remote. She would not have liked some chatty nurse. She hears a voice from the bedroom. It is a clean, clear voice that projects and rises. She realises she checks her face in the mirror.
‘I’m sorry, I had a bit of a spell there. I’m not supposed to drink alcohol.’
She thought as much.
‘I needed it, you know. Your fault.’
She looks about the room, sees a photo of herself. There are photos of other people too, some of whom she remembers. She sees him next to a tall young woman with a broad forehead, the image of him. A pixie child with dreadlocks. She looks back to the photograph of herself. Her hair used to reach her buttocks and he would dress her in it.
‘I’m happy to have you in here again.’
He has showered and wears a different shirt. He wears printed drawstring trousers and looks more like himself. His hair is pulled back and his beard looks combed. The young man has placed him in a wider wheelchair by the window. His feet are bare. He sees her looking at them, watches the journey of her eyes.
‘Come here.’
She shakes her head.
‘You’re not afraid of a little guy in a wheelchair?’
Now she wants to know what happened. Why he was up a ladder. Why him when there are idle young men on every street corner here, all of them more able than a sixty-year-old filmmaker.
It’s not the first time he’s read her thoughts.
‘I was stupid. Very stupid. I was checking the phone cable. It was worn through, the wires were exposed. I wasn’t getting an Internet signal. Couldn’t get a technician to get over here. You know how it is. I fell onto the cement ledge you can see down there. Didn’t feel a thing. Just flying. Descent. And a crack inside. A horrible crack. They did their best, you know.’
She worked out that it must have happened in February. The heaviest time of the year for her. Winter. Her favourite dog put down. And, over here, a spinal cord severed. This.
‘I wanted to call you. I wanted to hear your voice. I waited because I thought there was a chance. Now I know there is no chance.’
She wonders who walked him through it, who was there when he woke up. A wife? A daughter? A sturdy old friend or half-brother? She doesn’t know what the fuck she is doing here. And yet she knows, she knows.
‘I’d like to swim with you. Shall we go for a swim together tomorrow?’
She nods.
Neither of them are hungry that evening. She finds a tin of tea leaves next to the kettle on a small refrigerator in the corner of the living room. She makes two mugs of tea and wheels him onto the veranda.
In the night she hears his door open and close quietly. She hears murmuring. She can’t get back to sleep. The hot food completes its course through her and she sits on the loo listening to mosquitoes whining. She scratches bites on her legs. She drinks more water, feeling cramps in her stomach. It is dark in the room though there is a violet fluorescent light on outside somewhere below. There are bars on her window. She lies down again. The sea is inaudible, only the palm leaves stroke each other. She wonders if he is listening to the same thing, if the nights have become a dark tunnel. Or if there is a woman from downstairs spreading warmth through his body, pushing its force against the border where his nerves dissolve.
At daybreak he is dressed and showered, wheeled onto the veranda, waiting for her. He looks happy. He motions for her to come over and she feels bedraggled, creased and puffy. He tugs down her arm and kisses her cheek, which feels loose against the bone. His lips are warm, she knows their deep pressure. She feels a little spring, a fountain. She pulls away, closes her cardigan around her. The damp morning surrounds them. She never rises this early.
She knows what will happen. Somehow, she will lift him onto the bed. She does not know how their clothes will be removed, but they will be removed. He will cup his upper body to her back, a hand across her breasts, hooked under her shoulder. She will haul his knees behind her knees and her feet will enclose his lifeless feet. Later, she will trace the rim around his body, the fault line, the front. She will bring her wet cheek to the neat laceration on his spine.
It begins to rain. They both watch the morning shower, a clean curtain.
6.
We Will Dance in Lampedusa
Stanley Kenani
‘What is the first thing we’ll do when we arrive?’ Bibiana says to me.
‘We’ll make love,’ I say. ‘Right there on the beach at Lampedusa.’
She glances at the others and lowers her voice. ‘How can you say such a thing?’
‘They don’t understand our language. They speak Amharic, Somali, Tigrigna, Oromo … They don’t know what we’re talking about.’
‘They say we’ll arrive in twenty-four hours, no? My days are not good.’
‘What do you mean, “My days are not good”?’
‘Come on, you know what I’m talking about. We can’t risk it.’
‘Okay, in that case we’ll dance. We’ll hug and kiss and dance.’
‘Yes, we’ll dance,’ says Bibiana.
We both laugh and everyone in the boat stares at us. A baby begins to cry as though protesting that anyone could have the nerve to laugh in circumstances so dire. I turn to gaze at receding Tripoli: at the towering buildings some of which have been ruined by the savage blows of bombs; at the minarets from which the muezzin’s call above the gunfire still reaches us at sea like a radio at low volume; and at the beaches with white polished pebbles not yet stained by the bloody war.
The boat rocks from side to side. The symphony of waves is pleasant to my ears. In a flash, I drop my hand from around Bibiana’s waist to grip the boat’s edge. It is frighteningly audacious that they have managed to pack all of us in here. It is a small boat, like a plastic dinghy. I don’t know how many we are – around seventy – in a boat designed to carry less than half that number. But I hear it can be worse on trips like these, so I suppose I should not be too concerned about the
headcount. Thank heavens the boat is in good shape, its engine purring powerfully as we move with ease towards our destination. What a blessing that Bibiana and I are here, heading for this most precious of places. It’s a miracle, really, given how impossible it all seemed before we set off from home.
I turn again to look back to where we have come from. Africa is receding into our past. Tripoli is getting smaller. We can no longer hear the sound of the city’s bombs and gunfire and its call for prayer has now been muted by distance. Goodbye, Libya. I will never forget you.
*
Entering Tripoli was like walking into a blazing furnace.
‘Courage,’ Abdul-Jabaar kept telling us, ‘you have to have courage. I’ll leave you with Moustafa al-Arab, a close friend. You’ll be safe. The boat people will come for you when the weather is right.’
With those words he left us, after having taken us on the most perilous journey from our home city of Lilongwe on the southern part of our continent, after driving us in trucks disguised as fuel tankers, after crossing crocodile-infested rivers with us on shaky canoes, after making us pay double the amount we had initially agreed on so he could bribe immigration officials at numerous borders, after getting nearly roasted by the heat of the Sahara Desert, after surviving on only biscuits and water, sometimes for weeks, after fending off bandits who attacked us in the middle of the desert. After all that, Abdul-Jabaar left us in the hands of another stranger, in a Tripoli that had been set on fire by people who wanted their country to give them either freedom or death.
If Moustafa al-Arab had not hidden us in a garage at his Souq al Juma’ah house for three weeks, we probably would have perished. The fight to topple the dictator had turned bloody, and we came at a time when the fire was just beginning to burn too hot. For three weeks, we endured the sounds of guns and earth-shattering bombs. When we peered into the street through the crack in the wall, cars roamed in all directions, menacing weapons mounted behind them, their drivers looking for humanity to mow down. Sometimes we saw people, probably immigrants from our part of the world, being shot in cold blood. Moustafa told us that all those we saw killed, including women and children, were mercenaries hired by the dictator to fight the rebels.
