‘Can you help me?’
‘Sure.’ Kai puts the swan back on the table.
‘That’s impressive.’ Adrian picks up the swan. ‘Where did you learn to do this?’
‘I practise.’ He shrugs. He takes the scissors from Adrian. ‘What do you want me to do with those?’
‘Cut my hair. It’s driving me crazy.’
Kai rises and goes to stand behind Adrian, he picks up a strand of hair experimentally. ‘Do you have a comb?’
‘Yes.’ Adrian fetches a comb from the bedroom. Kai selects a lock of hair; the texture is disconcertingly glassy, the small nail scissors scarcely gain purchase. He snips at a few strands of hair, stops, watches the trembling in the fingers of the hand holding the scissors. This morning, in surgery, he’d been obliged – almost – to ask another surgeon to handle a delicate task. He’d even gone so far as to imagine what he might say, pretend that a speck of something was caught under his eyelid, an excuse to leave the room. In the end it had been all right. Kai concentrated on breathing and managed to steady his hand; just once he thought he saw the nurse’s eye upon him.
Sharp strands of hair fall to the floor.
‘Your wife didn’t want you to come here.’
‘Not as such.’
Kai considers Adrian’s reply for a moment. ‘That means no.’
‘I didn’t really give her the opportunity to object, if I am honest.’
‘OK.’
‘I needed something else. I could look up and see my future rolling into the distance. I knew exactly what was going to happen every day. I used to wonder, too, whether if I disappeared it would make any difference to any of my clients’ lives, I mean in reality as opposed to the short-term inconvenience. Probably it was a dangerous thing to do.’ He laughs. ‘But you know what I mean.’
Kai does not know what he means. Still, he chooses not to say. This is the way Europeans talk, as though everybody shared their experiences. Adrian’s tone suggested that the desire for something was all it took. They all live with endless possibilities, leave their homes for the sake of something new. But the dream is woven from the fabric of freedom. For desire to exist it requires the element of possibility, and that for Kai has never existed, until now, with the arrival of Tejani’s letters. There for the first time is the element of possibility, kindling for the small flame of his own desire. He looks at Adrian’s hair, which now is about an uneven two inches long all over.
‘I don’t think this is working,’ he says. And watches Adrian’s tentative fingers appear over the horizon of his head. ‘Wait. I’ll go and get a pair of clippers from the store.’
When Kai walked away from the hospital the day of the coup nobody tried to stop him for the simple reason he told nobody he was going. The most direct route to Nenebah’s house passed through the centre of town. He reasoned nobody else would think to go that way, which was the extent of his forethought. The hospital lay at the end of a street perpendicular to the main road. The street was empty as Kai had never seen it, even in the early hours of the morning. He kept moving, staying close to the walls of the buildings. A car, a Toyota packed with joyriding soldiers, crossed the intersection ahead of him. Kai stopped and crouched next to a stinking gutter. The vehicle passed by, leaving a trail of sound. The tune stayed in his mind. From behind a corrugated-iron yard door he saw a child’s face, regarding him through rusted eyelets. Kai put a finger to his lips. He stood up, doubled back on himself. This time he took the bay road, slung like a hammock between one high point of the town and another, the lowest point sagging through the city slums. The air was heavy with smoke, the tart fumes of burning fuel. A car approached him, travelling at speed. Kai caught a glimpse of the driver, a man wearing a panama hat, driving with a ferocious concentration. Kai raised his hand to ask for a lift. The driver passed by without slowing. Kai had expected little else. By now he had settled into a slow jog, marking time to the sound of his own breathing.
At the roundabout, a roadblock, Kai slowed to a walk. Five roads met at this point. He could see a dozen or so soldiers, some checking vehicles, others standing around. He saw the man with the panama hat sitting behind the wheel of his car. A soldier opened the car door, the man climbed down and the soldier took his place behind the wheel. Kai could see the man’s mouth, an oval of protest. A soldier patted the man on the shoulder. From inside the vehicle another soldier threw his briefcase to him. The man clumsily tried to catch it. The vehicle backed out, clutch screaming. Kai walked on with measured paces, his heart hammered in his chest, there was a ringing in his ears. He walked towards the checkpoint.
There were people – those desperate enough to venture out, or else with nothing to lose, street boys and madmen. The street boys cheered every time a military vehicle passed, the madmen cursed. When they saw Kai, several of the soldiers yelled at him to turn back. ‘Curfew. Go to your home.’ Kai stopped walking and raised his hands, then he approached slowly, he wanted them to see he was a doctor. Soldiers were almost superstitious about doctors, never knowing when they might need one. The smell of ganja was heavy in the air. Down each of the five roads fires burned, figures moved through the light and darkness, the sound of their calls like jackdaws.
‘Mansaray!’ somebody called him. A Bedford truck was slowing for the checkpoint. Kai looked up into darkness. ‘Mansaray!’ A hand reached out towards him through the wooden slats at the back of the truck. Automatically Kai stretched out his own hand. Up ahead the barrier was raised, the truck’s engine revved and the vehicle began to gather speed again. Whoever it was called, ‘I say, wait up! Wait up!’ The truck stopped five yards on the other side of the barrier and Kai raced towards it. He had no idea who he was running to, simply that this was his only chance. He climbed up on to the tailgate of the truck and sat down opposite the man who had called to him, an army officer around the same age as himself. ‘Lucky I saw you there, my friend.’ Hindered by the darkness, Kai struggled to recognise the other man at first, then it came to him. Five-a-side football. Kai had been in the college team for a season. Lansana was his name. Lansana what? He couldn’t remember.
‘They’ve invited the rebels into the city. For talks, they say,’ he told Kai. ‘But look at this. Most of these are not our men. Some of them, yes.’ Around them drunken looters staggered under the weight of their bounty. Cars abandoned full of crates and boxes.
The Bedford dropped Kai two streets short of Nenebah’s house. ‘Take care, man.’ Lansana gave him a high five as he prepared to climb out of the truck. A glimmer of light momentarily revealed the other man’s face to Kai. Behind the smile his eyes were flat, almost without expression. The look stayed with Kai for a long time afterwards, until finally he saw it for what it was. Fear, nerves or excitement, these had all been absent. And that, in turn, spoke of something else – the absence of hope. Kai thanked Lansana and wished he knew his surname.
The army was divided, he told Nenebah. If the army was divided it was dangerous for everyone. The army, the rebels, whoever they were – were attacking homes now. Even the diplomatic missions and the houses of the whites.
‘Funny, isn’t it?’ Nenebah had said once, not then, before. Before, before. When they were younger still, at university. What were they talking about? Some faraway atrocity reported in the news. The students passed a resolution condemning it. That was it, yes, he had dismissed the action with a joke. But she had a dislike of cynicism. ‘Hitler, Pol Pot. Funny, isn’t it? How it only seems to be evil people who think they can change the world? I wonder why that is.’ And Kai had responded, ‘Because they’re mad.’ She had dug a sharp elbow into his ribs. Then she shook her head. ‘But they do, don’t they? They do change the world.’
For the next three days Kai walked alone to the hospital, where the medical staff continued to report for work and treat the wounded with detached determination. This was their job, their life. At those times Kai was happy.
The memories come at unguarded moments, when he cannot sleep. In
the past, at the height of it, he had attended to people whose limbs had been severed. Working with a Scottish pain expert years later, he treated some of those same patients again. They complained of feeling pain in the lost limbs, the aching ghost of a hewn hand or foot. It was a trick of the mind, the Scotsman explained to Kai: the nerves continued to transmit signals between the brain and the ghost limb. The pain is real, yes, but it is a memory of pain.
And when he wakes from dreaming of her, is it not the same for him? The hollowness in his chest, the tense yearning, the loneliness he braces against every morning until he can immerse himself in work and forget. Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love.
CHAPTER 22
A day passed. Then another. The clouds hung thick over the city, only their patterns altered with the wind. It was as if we were trapped on the dark side of a mirror. We could see the world, people running through the rain, children playing in the puddles, but we could not hear them. The house was quiet. One or two of Julius’s colleagues from the university called, his absence at a meeting had been noted. We told them he had been called away on a family matter. No news of Kekura. The dancer fellow, I remember, dropped by. Somehow he had heard what had happened and he arrived, throwing out offers of help, claiming to have various contacts here and there among the police. I did not like his familiarity, the way he sat, legs splayed, arms stretched out along the back of the chair, making a display of himself. Nor did I believe his claims. Were the police taking dancing lessons now? But Saffia would take help where she found it. I had a growing sense by then that no good would come of stirring things up. Better to sit it out. And anyway, sure enough, the fellow returned hours later, with nothing to show for his apparent efforts.
After the door closed behind him, Saffia began to cry.
I moved over to sit by her. I put my arm around her. She neither resisted nor made to move away. The sobs came, dry, uneven, causing her shoulders to shudder. Her head rested on my shoulder. From her hair rose a close, earthy scent. A tear landed upon my shirt, and I felt it soak through the cotton and touch my skin. I stayed sitting there as long as I could until I felt the shift in her. Any moment she would regain her composure and perhaps feel awkward with our proximity. I stood up.
‘It will be over soon. There’s a procedure for these things, soon enough we will know.’
My words provided the break. She sat up straight, wiped her eyes and blew her nose.
‘Can I fetch you something?’ I said. ‘Shall we go and get something to eat?’
‘No thanks, Elias. I should stay close to the phone. But I am terribly thirsty.’
In the kitchen I opened the fridge door and reached for a bottle of water, but instead took a bottle of Coca-Cola, poured half of it into a glass along with a slug of Julius’s whisky. I put the glass on the table in front of her. She picked it up and took a sip.
‘What’s in here?’
‘A little whisky,’ I replied. ‘Just to calm you.’ She nodded and took another sip, began to rehearse aloud details from the previous days, starting with the morning after the party, a fingertip search through her own mind for whatever it was she had missed.
Outside the window, the blue of the sea turned grey and then black. In the garden the colours grew solemn and withdrew. The phone was silent. Between ourselves, little of consequence was said. I refilled Saffia’s glass, once, twice. She did not move from her place on the settee.
I stepped outside on to the verandah to gaze at the sky, the lead-blue darkness settling over the city. I lit a cigarette and smoked it in the darkness. Through the glass of the sliding door I could see Saffia. She sat in a coin of bright light from the lamp, her head rested on her forearm across the back of the settee. I stood and watched, I shrouded by darkness, she in the light. Something in her pose struck me, the weight of her head where it rested upon her arm. I realised she was asleep, or else on the verge of it. For several minutes I remained where I was, quite still.
I wished I could stay there all night. I let go of my self-imposed restraints and allowed myself to fantasise, to think what it might be like. That this was all mine, my home, lit up against the night. The sleeping woman inside my wife. Not sleeping from exhaustion, fear and whisky. But slumbering in peace.
I wished Julius would never come back.
The next day, at eleven o’clock in the morning, I was arrested. Two plain-clothes policemen were waiting for me on the stairs outside my apartment as I returned home carrying a freshly purchased cake for my breakfast. We drove away through the city and from the back of the car I watched people going about their business; already I envied them the mundane ritual of their mornings.
After a few minutes the car pulled up outside an unobtrusive single-storey building and I was taken inside. Two men were standing in the lobby. They paused their conversation, their eyes followed me as I was led by. A remark was exchanged with one of my escorts. Something frivolous, followed by a laugh. We passed into a corridor, a series of grey-painted doors on either side. One of the doors was open. They pushed me inside. A cell, windowless apart from a letterbox slit of window high up a wall. Stains on the wall. The air heavy with the reek of body odour. A desk, a chair. No other furniture. I placed the cake upon the desk and sat down.
I waited. I took the time to review my situation calmly. No point panicking. Julius, Yansaneh, Kekura. No doubt whatsoever I had been arrested in connection with those three. But what were they involved in? And what did it have to do with me? I knew nothing. I would tell that to the police. But would they believe me? It seemed unlikely anything could be that simple. With the thought my heart beat harder. They must believe me. I counted my breaths. One, two, three, four.
Outside the temperature rose and so did the temperature in the room. I pinched at the cloth of my shirt. I felt sticky. I heard occasional sounds of people passing down the corridor. Nobody stopped. Nobody came to the door. I had been in need of the toilet when I arrived, and as I sat there the pressure inside my bladder began to mount. I considered my options. I could continue to wait. I could call someone. It occurred to me they had left me without locking the door. I could step outside at any time, though that seemed somehow reckless. I held on ten more minutes, then stood up and knocked on the door. I listened. I waited. I rapped again. Footsteps in the corridor. The door opened and I took a step backwards. A man leaned in, glanced at me, pushed the door fully open and held it for a second man, who stepped into the room.
‘Mr Cole. Please sit down.’
The man in front of me was short, with very black skin, dressed in a charcoal-grey suit with short sleeves and button-down pockets; he was carrying a manila folder. The first man placed a chair inside the door and departed. The second man took the chair and placed it, not opposite me, as one might imagine, but on the same side of the desk. When he sat down our knees and elbows were practically touching. He placed the papers on the desk and folded his hands.
‘I must apologise for having inconvenienced you, Mr Cole. I know you are a teacher at the university.’
‘A lecturer.’
‘Of course.’ He smiled. ‘I hope this will not make you late for classes.’
I replied that classes were over for the holidays. I relaxed slightly, relieved to hear the civil tone he was taking. I had begun to let my nervous imagination get to me. I smiled back to signal my cooperation.
‘Good,’ he replied.
From his pocket he drew a pencil and opened the folder. I watched while he wrote my name in capital letters across the top of a piece of paper. At his request I supplied my address.
‘What is your position at the university?’ he asked.
‘I am a lecturer in modern history.’
‘And how long have you taught there?’
I told him. He wrote the information down. He seemed to write at an interminable pace, like a child copying his letters.
‘If I am to make a statement, could I perhaps write it?�
� I offered.
‘It is quite all right, Mr Cole.’ He glanced up, surveyed me momentarily. ‘I know what I’m doing.’ Something in the glance, the way he seemed to enjoy enunciating the syllables of my name, stopped me persisting. He added, ‘This is not a formal statement. Just some notes for my own records.’
He asked me details about my life. The time I had lived at my present address, my landlady’s name. Where I had been born and where I had studied. Which courses I taught at the university. At the mention of European history he stopped writing in order to share with me some observations on the Jacobean Wars, in which he claimed to have an interest. Amateur, naturally, he smiled. Guy Fawkes. Catholic Spain. The Gunpowder Plot. He’d become interested after observing the rituals of Bonfire Night while training in England. I could not see the relevance of any of this to my case. Though because he seemed friendly enough, I made a pretence of listening and kept my knees pressed together. I yearned for a cigarette, but I had none on me. He resumed writing. Broke off again to ask me about the contents of the box on the table. I told him the box contained a cake. His pencil lead broke, he called for a replacement. The minutes ground by.
After over an hour he had still not asked me anything of substance. I knew the time because I glanced at my watch.
Without looking up or interrupting his meticulous transcription of my answers, he said, ‘Do you need to be somewhere?’
I replied that I did not, however I did need to use the bathroom.
He continued to write.
‘I need to use the toilet,’ I repeated.
He looked up at me appearing to focus, like a small creature emerging out of the darkness: ‘Yes, of course.’
‘Thank you.’ I stood up. He waved me back down again.
‘This won’t take a minute. Please, Mr Cole, be patient. As soon as we are done here I will have somebody show you to the bathroom. You can relax. Enjoy some breakfast.’ He smiled, indicating the cake with a nod.
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