Inside, Susan went to Julian and let him hold her hand. He could see that she was thirsty and he poured some water for her, thinking as he did so that his Susan—if she’d let him call her that, he would have to ask—was something like a flower. Like a rose, he thought.
They listened as the telephone rang out and the answering machine clicked. It was Fontanella. “Flora dear! Flora, I do hope you’ll come on Thursday. We’re going to try again, you know. We’re going to work this out. Blackie’s got some information for you. Flora, are you there? Oh, Flora! I haven’t heard from Eva Bright, have you? Flora! Flora? Don’t do this alone.” Susan closed her eyes and leaned back into Julian. She did like how he smelled. Like good earth, a little bit like sky.
Eva kept her eyes on Flora, and, bit by bit, something seemed to happen. Flora’s sobs subsided. She stood looking at the bikes, their parts strewn all around her. Eva thought, Yes, breathe, Flora, that’s right. And as she did so, she could feel a tingle at her toes. The next came to her unbidden and it was a surprise: You are strong, my love, she thought. She had never once referred to any clients as “my love,” as if she and they were bound together by a sturdy, tender care. But it occurred to her, genuinely and purely, that she really did love Flora. That she really hoped, oh, yes, that George Hewett would get better, that he’d rise out of his bed and hold his wife or move the furniture or take a broom to the front steps, whatever husbands did. No matter what she’d thought of George when he had risen up and frightened her, when he’d stared blankly with those discolored, yellow eyes. Whatever he had done in Africa or not, whether he’d been followed by a djinn through all these years, or had brought it all himself, from some cruel place within him, as a joke on his own wife. Whether he was mad, or simply feeble, very much his own mysterious, ordinary self.
As the sun grew dim and the bloated seaside sky went fat with evening blue, Eva found that she herself, she, Eva, wanted this to work, and she felt aware, as well, that this wanting was hers, not Sheikh Abdul Aziz’s, and that made her feel strong. She didn’t know if Sheikh Abdul was with them. If he had simply come to tease them and then disappeared for good. If he’d ever come at all. But she didn’t think it mattered, suddenly, although she knew that for a woman who dealt primarily in ghosts and who had long believed in what she did—had never thought of hobgoblins or sylphs—not minding was strange. All she could do was this: she willed her words to Flora, harder. You can do this, dear. It’s only yours to do. All the strength she had, she tried without moving an inch to send to Flora Hewett’s limbs.
Flora moved painfully about. She did not stop until the two big bicycles, their makeshift mountain goats, had come perfectly apart. She began to sift through their tough rubble, determining an order. Then she moved the pieces from their piles beneath the tree into the flagstone circle. One by one, she hefted them into the air and dropped them down the well. The chain sang as it went. The tires blubbered. The bolts went soundlessly. The top bars were larger, a bit awkward, but she sent them down with a great shove and a cry. Her pace was even, sure. The handlebars, both sets of them at once, were last. They rattled, grazed the stone inside, before striking the black water—a far crashing, like the coming of a sea. When she had finished, Flora looked down at her hands. They were nicked and bruised and splashed. Blood on her right thumb. The ring. She looked down at it and sighed, then brought her left hand up and kissed the spirit’s jewel. Shucking leaves and grass, she adjusted the blue cloths and straightened her black hat.
And next she turned, came carefully towards Eva. “That’s it, then,” she said. Eva watched her, didn’t speak. Flora said, “I’d like you all to go now.” The tears were sticky on her cheeks, pink traces of face powder gathered at the creases of her mouth. Her nose and eyes were red, but she looked steady, firm. Alert. All pearl buttons buttoned. Eva nodded. She waved at Susan through the window. Julian, a red blur, turned towards the front door. “Thank you.” Flora raised her hand, those twisted fingers, her sharp bones, a glint of silver light. Behind her, no plums fell. The primroses were closed. “It’s time now,” Flora said. “I’m going to see George.”
Theft
A City to the South, 1992
There and then not there, the bus came like a prowler through the not quite dawn’s thick fog. It—Jahazi Coastal Seven—bobbed a bit, coasted on, and rolled into a bare, wide space under a shattered lamppost at the edge of the old bus grounds. Beneath the mist: a wide expanse, droppings, litter, shards. Other things unseen. The world so dim and cold. Ezra, thinking of the uncle and the house, of comforts and of things he knew he had, advised the passengers to stay in their chill seats. “Not safe, out there. Sleep, now. Stay, please.” He was half-hidden by the dark.
But for the few who knew their way, felt brave, and had nothing to carry, the travelers, hard to see in that night gray (seven of them, eight?), remained. Four of them were strangers to this place; they did not understand a thing, but did as they were told. The others, not as raw, knew Ezra was right. “At six. At six you can get out.” Ezra settled in the aisle. Sharp face hidden in the crook of a thin elbow, he lay on a jute bag near the driver and the steps. With his fingertips but without moving otherwise, eyes closed, he pulled the cuffs of his white shirt—the only light, close thing that most of them could see—over his curled fists; a sleep gesture, receding from the world and turning in. The driver, sleek and thickset Iffat, since the last stop in the darkness more silent than a stone, seemed already asleep. Iffat breathed but shallowly, lids an unshut seam. He had—if Ezra’d only caught it!—the air of a performer. The others did as they were told, dozed fitful for an hour.
Four rows down and to the right, Lucy, unused to travel without guides, twitching and alert and not as rugged as she had been when she’d agreed to getting on (hours back, nearly a whole day!), knotted and unknotted her thin hands. Her skin itched. She felt soiled. Her dry eyes would not close. She pressed her face against the window and saw the world beyond it brownish, greenish, bruised, purple at the heart. Through the panes—plastic, mostly, to replace good glass that had broken long ago—she could vaguely see the ticket stands, cargo boxes tipped up on their sides, locked and double-locked against the city’s temperamental night. Farther out, the dimly moving shapes of watchmen, stiff and sore, stretching necks and arms; even farther, shifting and ablur, a few daring, careless seekers, poking, shuffling in the bins. (The words night crawler appeared. Crawler-crawler-crawler, Lucy thought, then stopped.) Beneath the awkwardness of it, how she felt exposed though no one cared to look at her, beneath the chafing and the way her very scalp hurt, she was proud of having booked her journey back to the big city for the airport, without help from the hotel. (That manager who had betrayed her!) But when was daylight in these parts?
It was hard moving alone. The landscapes, so refreshing to consider when a person has a room and key and knows there will be breakfast, had on the road seemed altogether different. And they were: pale earth followed by gray rocks, mounds of them like eggs, tinged pink at the cheeks; later the red soil, a climb, a steep and sudden fall, thick pine forests and green valleys; eventually the darkness, which was liquid, more black and more glassy and more hollow than a dream’s. No longer that light coast, the sweep of sand and sea, the palms; the low hotel, its rooms facing the beach, doors opening on bright green tile and sand.
Lucy had not known how hard the bus would be, how many people could get on in one thick and shifting wave and push one to the side, even if a passenger had paid for a whole seat and had a ticket stub to show. A ticket stub was nothing. She’d been glad when, well before the city’s heart, most of them had left; in the emptiness she’d thought a calm might settle on her. But the air, which she’d desired, was also bloated from the night. She could feel each follicle along her legs, the joints inside her skin, as though they, too, had swelled to fill a void. She wished the mist would clear.
At six, the day was pearly and aglow, at last, as promised, coming right. The mist, thin curls dying in
the light, broke nearly all at once; the first crows cawed and clacked. Burly Iffat woke—as if he hadn’t been asleep at all—and stood up like a shot. He cast the passengers a darting look, bent to pull the handle, watched the door come free. He nudged Ezra—Ezra, who’d really, deeply been asleep—with his heavy shoe, then jumped. His landing on the ground out there—spryer than his shape—was thick and sharp, a complete sound, ballast dropping hard. From below, on earth, he said, “Ezra, weh. You handle this for me, right? I’ll be back.” He had something to do. If Ezra could just get the luggage down and help these last ones off. “Nothing to it.” Going to protect himself, finish up a deal, he was, but Ezra couldn’t know.
Iffat’s wild dog smile showed a missing tooth, the creases at his eyes. The dawn light through the pinpricks in the concha of his ears showed white, a dot of day on each side of his head. The dots moved with his smiling. That smile, the blades of light (Ezra didn’t like it), made him get up fast. “All right. No problem,” Ezra said, and Iffat, leading with his chin, lifted up his head to say yes you know your place and that is very good. Like a cheeky man who jumps from bed while a dreaming lover lolls, he slapped his hand against the flank of the old bus, and then was on his way.
Lucy saw him—Iffat—right his woolen cap and, before rounding the corner, stop to check his watch. Over a big shoulder, he looked quickly back, at them, the bus. Observant in her way, Lucy thought: he’s strong, he knows where he’s going. She had the vague idea that she would like to move about the world like that, slapping things good-bye and striding off, just so. Taking, Lucy thought, precisely what he wants.
Ezra, standing at the head, suddenly their leader, rubbed his skull with both his hands, scratched his narrow throat and that flat chest beneath the collar of his shirt. “All right, all right, it’s morning now,” he said, to let the sleepers know. “Welcome to the city! That’s right, you’ve arrived.” Lucy didn’t need to be told twice that it was time to touch the ground. She was aching to. The clammy air. The way the leather of the seat was sucking at her skin, even through the cotton dress. Something bit her ankle. Her joints cracked as she rose. The local passengers pushed forward while the strangers, Lucy and the other three, made ready with their awkward feet to step into the aisle.
Ezra dropped to earth himself before the passengers streamed out. Poor Ezra. Bus touts, ticket boys (though he was a man, of course, or about to become so), oughtn’t have to deal with such a shock and stir. He slipped the key into the luggage lock, turned the shiny handle, and lifted up the door. And felt his heart shoot to his shoes and up again, racing past his eyeballs to the far sky of his head. Alone in that big space, one green banana rolled. Tufts of nylon string come loose from someone’s stolen pack. The luggage hold was empty. Around Ezra, the locals who had landed, too, made sharp sounds in their throats. Then there was a shout.
Lucy moved into the aisle and started down the steps because the big white man who had sat not far behind her (head cocked, lizard-eyed) had said, “Ladies first” just there. He’s sweating, Lucy thought with a quick glance, then, unsteady on her legs, found herself outside. The other passengers agog, upset. What’s happened? After those first cries, a roar. A show of fists. Hard voices. One man, bright, long-sleeved in a red shirt, brown trousers so well starched their creases had not felt the trip, stood, feet spread, threatening Ezra, yelling for the driver. Another in a city suit—poisonous dust-pink, Kaunda-style, neat pockets up and down—smacked the air and shook his head in warning; the woman, old and wrinkled, bent over in black cloths, said the word “police.” The two men reeled and wound, hands out towards the hold: that emptiness! They slapped at the bus, too, but not as Iffat had; they slapped those flanks as if they’d like to roll it on its side and turn it on its head, smacking a fool’s face to have that fool make sense.
Lucy felt the white man, corpulent and damp, suddenly impatient, hurtle down behind her. She landed in a hurry, pressed herself behind the open door. The other strangers, two long boys—beards on their young chins, red bites, scratches, on their knuckles and their knees—stepped out, a little ginger, sure, but braver than she was. They took up a position farther out, to see what they could see.
A jarring of the bus-skin, human spine on metal. Thump. Thick scratch and smoke of sand when a body falls upon it. Red Shirt and Kaunda knocked stunned Ezra down and held him to the ground. Red Shirt knelt towards him, elbows in his chest; the other one, Kaunda, standing tall, from his regal heights stepped on Ezra’s leg. Beneath a glossy wingtip, Ezra’s knee twitched hard. “You did this!” they said. “We trust you with our things and this is what you do? Thief! Thief!” Ezra jerked and snapped. Like a fish, thought Lucy, cool, something frozen in her; she did not even gasp. The woman egged them on. Red Shirt dug an elbow under Ezra’s ribs and punched the bus tout’s sorry face. From above, still standing, Kaunda kicked his side. Ezra crumpled, flailed, was not ready to fight back. A murmur: “I didn’t know, I didn’t know.” Another punch—Ezra’s lower lip split, and the blood brought on a pause. Curious and put out, the big white man appeared between them. “Now just a minute, here,” he said, and because Ezra’s mouth was streaming and the man was thick and white and wider than them all, they paused to look at him. “You don’t understand,” one said.
The white man blinked and frowned, was about to speak. From Ezra’s place, the intervener’s chest (pale blouse vast and pasted to his flesh, a rumpled linen suit) looked like the high sides of a mountain, and his face like a red fruit—a mango, purple at the cheeks and at the curve of his bald head—pate agleam with the same light that had streamed through Iffat’s ears. Ezra didn’t move. Would this one kick him, too? He could sense the white man’s feet, how big they were, the brown snout of his shoe.
Before the stranger could respond, decide what he would do—he’d said, again, “Now just a minute, here”—the old woman, who had watched and cheered the punching on, veered around, called out, “Jamani, there he is! He’s come with the police!” Ezra was aware of a black flash, the woman in her cloths ajump, this way and then that. She was shouting, she’d had produce down there, fruit, things that she could sell, and what had this man done, this stupid, stupid man? She’d tell everyone, everyone, that’s right. What else was she to do? Ezra’s view, between their twitching feet: Iffat, playing a mean part, with an officer, a copper man in tow.
The untried passengers, new and unaccustomed, felt a dart of hope: a copper! The driver has come back. This matter may be righted. But the locals understood. No order, justice, here at all. Iffat, shaking his thick head like a person who is baffled. The copper at his side, short sleeves neatly pressed. That paunch! Remarkable, thick avocado nut still lodged in a half, those bright thighs, plump, beaming like a well-fed homing bird’s, the buttocks that could be distinguished even from the front, outer edges of a bulbous moon on either side of the short legs—oh, they understood his walk. That mean slapping of heels. And most of all: the sunshades.
See how carefully this copper has decided on the glasses. Why wear sunshades at all, so early in the day? Ask yourself: who wears them? Lean men tinged in gold with pistols in their pants, gangsters in the films—America! hot dreams!—men with aeroplanes to fly, extravagant new suits, and men, yes, just like this. The two perfect silver pools, revealing nothing of his eyes, showed themselves instead: these seven people round the struggling ticket boy, the flattened tout, that Ezra. Where two eyes should have been they saw their own horrid huddle, shrinking, swelling in the lenses, tiny, warped, upset, and that vision did this work: Here you are, you eight, thinking how enormous is your loss, but you are minute after all, right here in my eyes. Bad enough, indeed. And yet another tell. Why, like a perfume, a loathsome titter in the air? How was it that the sound of them was laughter, though both their mouths were closed? In. On. It. In on it. The two of them. The driver and the copper. What was there to say?
Before they got too close, the locals took their chance. They knew how this worked. No need to give their n
ames. Make things worse, it would, make them future prey. They knew: the theft had happened long ago, perhaps hours before when in the blackness they had gotten out to pee or eat, and others sleeping still. Not everybody’s bags, just these, these aimed for the last stop. They’d go.
Kaunda, who’d kicked Ezra so hard, gave the boy a weighing look, and saw then one more thing, which made him sorry for the blow: Ezra was an innocent. Ezra hadn’t known. He bent and pulled the bus tout by the elbow, leaned him up against the bus, then spat onto the ground. No culprit, this, an idiot, bleeding like a hen. “You get out of this,” Kaunda said. “You’re working for a thief.” He took the wrinkled woman’s arm. “Let’s go, Ma, there’s nothing to be had here. Let it go, let it go like wind.”
While the copper, who was close now, said, “Jamani, what’s the hurry? What’s been going on here?” the locals headed off. “We’re fine, sir. Fine. No problem.” Another bus theft, oh. And while it was much worse for them all because their things were more precious, it was also, if in only a small way, better: there was the awful tang of having lost their things for sure, and then the steam released of having turned their anger on the boy, and then the kick of how they’d all been had. But then, and then, because the mist had really lifted firmly now and there could be porridge somewhere, maybe, and still some loved ones living, and they did know their way, there was also this hard and mitigating thing: a laugh. A laugh at those four white ones who didn’t know how this worked at all.
Theft Page 11
