The Memory of Love

by Forna, Aminatta

  He wants something he can never have again.

  He wants to go home.

  In the chair Kai sits with his eyes closed, his forearm along the armrest, fingers loosely grasping the whisky glass. For the first time Adrian notices an intravenous needle taped to the inside of his arm. There is a bloodstain on the front of his T-shirt. Adrian moves to take the glass. Kai starts, opens his eyes.

  ‘Go ahead. Sleep,’ says Adrian.

  Kai gives a soft laugh. ‘I thought you knew, man. Sleep isn’t something I do.’ He closes his eyes again. After a while he says, ‘I was serious, you know.’

  Daylight. Noise. Adrian wakes from a dream. Riding in a rickshaw on a rutted road. He noticed he was not wearing shoes. He called to the rickshaw driver to stop and climbed down to search among the market stalls for a pair of shoes. He could not find any, he began to panic. He was going to be late. Late for what, though, he did not know, couldn’t remember. Mamakay appeared and pointed to a pair of black flip-flops. ‘These will do,’ she said. ‘Are you sure?’ Adrian replied. He felt better now she was with him. She smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It really doesn’t matter.’ Arrows of sunlight. Around him the images disperse. Reality displaces the dream: the apartment, the events of the night before. He is stiff and weary as if he had been beaten. From outside, the sound of a cockerel calling. The juddering is still there. Adrian looks up to see Kai shaking in his sleep. He rises and touches Kai on the shoulder. ‘You’re dreaming,’ he says.

  Kai opens his eyes, blinks and wipes his mouth. ‘Sorry.’ He stands and goes into the bathroom. When he emerges his face and neck, the front of his T-shirt are damp. Standing in the kitchen, Adrian feels the presence of the other man as Kai comes in to stand silently behind him. He watches the coffee granules as they dissolve into the hot water.

  ‘I’d be prepared to try, if you want, that is. There’s one thing we could do,’ says Adrian.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It would involve returning you to the scene of whatever happened.’

  ‘Hypnosis.’

  ‘Not hypnosis. I won’t put you in a trance as such, though I will ask you to focus your concentration on what happened. It’s a way of reprocessing past events and desensitising you to the impact of them, I mean the way you think about them, if we know what those events were. In this case we do, at least you do. It can reduce the symptoms you experience, the dreams.’

  ‘Does it work?’

  ‘I believe so. But it’s only fair I warn you …’

  Kai interrupts. ‘Will it make it worse?’

  Adrian exhales. ‘No,’ he says.

  ‘Then what do I have to lose?’

  CHAPTER 55

  Kai follows Adrian’s index finger as it switches back and forth. He can hear his eyes click in their sockets. He concentrates on keeping track of the finger. Sometimes he seems a millisecond ahead of it, sometimes a fraction of a beat behind. He is sitting on a chair, not the soft wicker armchair, but upon an upright hard chair, his feet square to the floor. Adrian sits opposite, about two feet to Kai’s right. He is holding up his index finger.

  ‘Keep your eyes on my finger.’

  Kai follows the movement of Adrian’s finger, left to right, right to left. He feels, gradually, acutely aware of his own body, of the interlocking bones, the muscles and sinews stretched between the joints, the blood coursing throughout. He feels the hardness of the floor, the weight of his body pressing down on the soles of his feet, the physical effort it requires to sit upright, to keep his body taut and balanced.

  ‘Think about what you are feeling when you think about the bridge and what happened. What do you think about?’ Adrian’s voice is calm and level.

  ‘There was a girl. Her name was Balia.’

  ‘What about Balia?’

  ‘I couldn’t …’ Kai stops and swallows. ‘She didn’t …’ He shakes his head.

  ‘Keep following my finger.’

  Kai concentrates on the movement of Adrian’s finger. He breathes deeply. He forces his mind to return to the past.

  He is walking down the corridor of the hospital, stepping over the bodies of men, the chemical scent of blood in the air. The background noise is of shouted orders, gurney wheels, the whimpered groans of the wounded. Behind the sound of human voices comes the drum roll of machine gunfire, the bass note of mortars exploding in the hills and in the east of the city.

  Day Eighteen. 24 January 1999. Every nurse and doctor who could be located had reported for work. The wards were in ceaseless turmoil. All non-emergency patients had been discharged to make way for the new intake, even the paediatric ward had been emptied. It was as though plague had struck, a plague which tore open men’s chests, blew off limbs, ripped through muscle and bone, unleashed arrowheads of shrapnel into soft flesh. Nights on end Kai did not sleep, or slept standing up, for he had no memory of sleeping and could not later imagine where such an event might have taken place, there was not a spare bed, chair, or inch of floor space. He made his way down the corridor, the first time he’d left the theatre in many hours. Last time he walked down this corridor it had been daylight, and now it was day again.

  A smell of coffee. In the staff room he found the new nurse making mugs of weak coffee, heaped teaspoons of sugar and powdered milk. The new nurse was very young and very pretty; he found it hard not to be aware of her evident attraction to him. What was her name? Balia. Balia offered him a cup of coffee, blinked and smiled with embarrassment. He smiled back at her, said thank you and used her name as he did so, left the room bearing the mug, sipped the coffee and felt the heat hit his stomach and moments later the sugar enter his bloodstream. The arrival of the injured showed no signs of slowing. Apart from coffee Kai had fed on nothing but adrenalin for days. All things considered, the hospital was about the safest place to be. Evidence of the fight that was taking place out in the streets of the city was strewn all over their floor.

  Kai picked his way through the dying and injured, looking for his next patient, someone likely to survive. The medical staff had to ration their resources, their skills, their energy. Kai’s eyes travelled the lines of slumped, bleeding men, assessing injuries, life chances, rejecting those who looked too far gone. A soldier whose jaw had been blown away wore the uniform of the foreign fighting forces. Kai’s eyes passed over him and returned, drawn by the nature of the injury. The man was sitting up with his back to the wall, nodding and gesturing, making the effort towards speech with the local reporter who stood above him. As Kai watched he reached into his pocket and withdrew a document, an ID card or a photo, and handed it over. Astonishingly, absurdly, above the hole that had been his face – and this you could tell from his eyes – the man appeared to be smiling.

  Kai was there, coffee in hand, making his way down the corridor, momentarily arrested by the sight of the injured man, when he heard the sound of gunfire close at hand. He was too exhausted, too focused on the task at hand to feel anything approaching fear. He turned to see the intruders enter the building. The reporter, who had, a moment before, been standing just a yard away from Kai, was suddenly gone. For the first time in days, there was silence, a brief moment of silence.

  Then, a single word.

  ‘You!’

  The man holding the gun pointed it at Kai’s chest. Balia, coming out of the staff room, straight upon the scene, was seized by one of the gunmen. Kai was still carrying his coffee as they walked towards the car. He didn’t feel afraid. But someone kept pushing him from behind, making him angry. He turned and shoved the barrel of the gun away, slopping coffee down his front. He glanced at Balia, her face stiff with fear, walking with small, reluctant steps.

  Nobody bothered to blindfold them. Nobody wore a mask. That meant something, surely, Kai thought, as they drove through the stillness of the city. He wondered if he should feel afraid.

  They arrived at an old, partly burned government building. The patients were all fighters. Young, adolescent, their arms, legs and guts full of
metal. The rebels spoke to each other in many different languages of which Kai recognised some and not others. The commander, to whom Kai was taken, was perhaps seventeen. Kai heard those around call him Amos. Kai told Amos he could be of no help without supplies. While Amos consulted his aides, Kai waited and looked around him. There was little furniture left in the room, the President’s portrait bore the scars of a bayonet, someone had drawn hopscotch squares on the carpet. Kai was put into the back of the same car and driven through the town to a pharmacy, where his captors looted the shelves of morphine, sterile dressings, rubber gloves, saline solution and IV equipment under his instruction.

  A heavy wooden door served as the operating table. For hours Kai worked with Balia at his side. They worked well together, efficiently, though Balia’s hands never stopped shaking. Amazingly, Kai succeeded in losing himself in his work, in forgetting his surroundings and the circumstances, seeing only wounds, what could be debrided, sutured, what was a viable limb and what was not. All of the injuries were fresh. A young combatant, having lost the affections of a girlfriend and unable to endure the teasing of his colleagues, had torn the pin from a grenade and tossed it into the back of the lorry that contained his tormentors.

  At the end of eight hours there was insufficient light to continue working. Kai called for Captain Amos and asked for his permission to leave. The young commander looked at him with eyes that were darkly opaque and seemed to absorb the remaining light. He told Kai he might yet be needed, they were both to stay. In the morning they would be released.

  They lay on the floor by the wall. Kai stayed awake, to guard over Balia. He listened to the sounds from outside, far away and close at hand, terrifying comings and goings. He tried to reassure Balia, but his words rang hollow in the darkness. The scent of ganja. Laughter, hard and humourless. Shouts. Music. Swearing and singing. Screams. Swells of cheering. More than once he thought he heard a helicopter. There were other, unexplained sounds. Then footsteps. Somebody passing by rapped upon the door, causing Balia to whimper and huddle closer to him. Kai listened carefully, trying to make sense of what was happening.

  Several hours into the night, the door opened. Somebody held a kerosene lamp close to Kai’s face. There were seven of them, Kai counted carefully. It seemed they had come to stare, as though they had known there was something unexpected to be found in the room. There were some changes of places, people entered and left, called others. Kai felt his heart contract. He got to his feet to be on the same level as the newcomers.

  ‘What do you want?’ he said.

  ‘You’re the doctor?’ From his voice he was young. Kai had the sense they were all young, all smaller than him at any rate. He could hear a bottle being passed in the darkness behind.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kai, hoping perhaps he was needed.

  ‘Who is this? Is this your girlfriend?’

  ‘She’s not my girlfriend, she’s a nurse.’

  ‘She’s your girlfriend. Look how fine she is. Why don’t you share your girlfriend with us? You tink say because you na big doctor, you deserve better than we.’

  Kai asked for Captain Amos, but got no reply. It was hard to make out who he was speaking to: he could smell better than see them.

  Somebody reached around him, seized Balia’s arm and pulled her away from him.

  ‘We want to fuck your girlfriend, Mister Doctor.’ The speaker raised his eyebrows and smiled broadly, confidently. Kai could see the gleam of his teeth as he waited for Kai’s reaction. Kai didn’t speak. His brain worked cold and fast. Whatever came next was critical. Then from Balia a sob. She began to plead, a low, wavering, ululating sound. Laughter. Balia twisted and strained.

  ‘She is a nurse,’ said Kai. ‘Please let her go.’

  Somebody sucked his teeth.

  Somebody else said, ‘These two came from the hospital. I saw them there. Let us leave them.’

  Kai was quiet, praying for whoever had just spoken to speak again. He might yet be able to talk his way out of this.

  Then Balia screamed. Hysteria convulsed her. Kai was hit in the face and fell backwards against the wall. For a few moments he lost all sense of what was happening. The next he knew an argument had broken out between the boys and Balia was crouched on the floor by their feet, her arms crossed in front of her breasts. He pulled himself upright. He could feel blood trickling down the back of his throat. Something had changed since the morning when Kai and Balia had been taken from the hospital, in the eight hours during which they worked in their makeshift theatre. Kai knew there was only one thing it could be. The rebels had staked everything on the battle for the city. Now they were losing. The prize was slipping through their fingers. It was unthinkable that they would go back to the bush. This recklessness was the result of knowing it was all over for them. Nothing awaited them save death. They had nothing to lose and they would take Balia and Kai down with them.

  Even so, Kai tried to reason. Again he asked for Amos. They laughed. Somewhere close by a shell exploded. Somebody threw a bottle, which smashed in the corner of the room. One of the boys pulled Balia up by the arm and began to yank at her clothing, push his hands between her legs. Kai sprang at the youth. The larger of the two, Kai pulled him away easily enough. Then they were on the floor. The boy jerked and wriggled, grabbed at Kai’s face, clawing at his nose and lips. There was the sound of jeering. Someone sloshed liquid over them. Kai freed himself from the boy’s fingers, pulling them back one by one. The others had formed themselves into a circle around the fighting pair, were watching, waiting for what came next. Kai stood up. A moment of silence, all eyes were upon him. He made to step out of the circle, to find Balia. In his mind he had the idea that he had only to start walking and not stop; if he did so with sufficient boldness they might not challenge him. He managed two more steps. Blocking his way was the self-appointed leader, he of the cocky grin.

  ‘Please step aside,’ said Kai.

  The boy grinned at him.

  ‘Get out of my way.’ Kai reached out his left hand, made to shift the boy to one side with the back of his hand. The boy held his ground. His eyes were locked on to Kai’s. He looked unearthly: a strange, beautiful creature, intelligent and possessed of lethal instincts. That’s what Kai was thinking when the rifle butt smashed into the back of his skull. He felt his teeth jar in his skull, a burst of pain. Then he was down on his knees again, and suddenly they were all upon him. He tried to crawl forward. Blows and kicks fell down upon him. Somebody jumped on his back and rode him, hands around his neck, cutting off his air supply. He held out briefly, then collapsed under the weight of bodies. He felt the bodies lifting away from him. Air. He was distantly aware of hands plucking at his clothing. Fingers at his belt, hands at his ankles. They were stealing his clothes.

  Naked now, he lay in the ring of children. The leader walked around him, aiming lazy kicks at him. Every now and again one of the others would dart in to deliver a blow of their own. Kai tried to raise his head. His thoughts were of Balia, but he couldn’t see her. Somebody spat at him, and he felt the dribble of phlegm on his cheek.

  ‘Where’s your girlfriend?’ The now familiar voice. ‘Maybe they already fucking her. Or maybe you go fuck her first? Not so? Because you bigger than us. Not so? How our parents raised us. Elders first. Hey?’

  Kai didn’t answer. Somebody fell into him. It was Balia. She struggled to right herself and sat, hugging her knees, keening from side to side.

  ‘Show us how you fuck, big man, Mister Doctor. We just small boys. Teach us how to fuck this fine woman. So we can learn from you.’

  Somebody struck him on the buttocks with a stick. He heard a click and the barrel of a pistol was placed at his head. ‘Fuck her or I kill you.’

  Kai pulled himself up to his knees. He did not know what to do. Could see no way out. They would kill him and Balia, too. Of that he was certain. He made to move towards her. She did not shrink back, but hugged herself and sobbed. All around him they were baying now. The person with t
he stick hit him at intervals. He stopped still. He felt the gun at his temple.

  ‘Fuck her or I fuck you.’ First spoken and then screamed into his ear, combining with the ringing in his head to make him dizzy. ‘Fuck her or I fuck you.’

  The gun was removed from his temple. Kai tried to force himself to think. He was helpless. He felt something – the gun barrel – being pushed between his buttocks, heard the laughter, felt the end of it being rammed into him. The pain was acute and rippled through his body. Clapping. Cawing laughter. The gun barrel was thrust further into him. He flopped forward and was forced up, back on to his hands and knees. He was aware of Balia only peripherally, as she lunged, the sharp report of the gun, the shallow arc described by her body in the air as she fell backwards.

  She was dying, not yet dead when he carried her to the vehicle. He was ordered into the back and struggled to lift her over the tailgate. Nobody helped him; they watched him and screamed at him. He was terrified of failing, of being made to leave her behind. The city was burning. He felt the heat of the fires on his naked skin, the broken glass in the soles of his feet. The rebels were in retreat. He climbed up into the back and cradled Balia in his arms.

  They drove west, towards the hills. Dawn was coming, a glow upon the sky. A cock crowed, a sound so ordinary it seemed to come from another world. The noise of the battle receded. They turned at a junction, heading for the peninsula bridge and the beach. He tried to concentrate on the moment, on what he should do, to force himself to think, make a plan, but he could not. He held on to Balia.

  They reached the bridge and stopped. Someone with a gun ordered Kai down. He stumbled, dragging Balia with him. They ordered him to stand by the metal railing. He felt it cold against the small of his back, remembered his nakedness. Absurdly it occurred to him that if they let him go he would have no clothes. The driver was climbing back into the vehicle. Kai felt a moment of hope. The driver’s companion was making his way around the other side of the vehicle, opening the door, preparing to climb inside. Kai stood holding Balia. He watched. He waited. He saw the man stop and retrace his steps, much as though he’d forgotten something. He came back around the vehicle, approaching Kai with sudden determination. Kai knew what was coming. He saw the man pull the gun out of his belt, raise his arm and take aim. Kai closed his eyes. He leaned his body backwards, holding tight on to Balia, backwards over the railing, until he felt himself topple under the weight of their combined bodies. He kicked out. Something thudded into them. A bullet. He could not tell whether he had taken it or Balia. He was falling.