The Water Thief

by Claire Hajaj

  ‘There are three great rivers with which sinners purify themselves in this world: a river of sincere repentance; a river of good deeds that drowns the sins that surround it; and a river of great calamities that expiate sins . . . So swim . . . and have patience.’

  Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Madārij al-Sālikin (Stages of the Wayfarer)

  Contents

  Prologue

  Dry Season

  October

  November

  December

  New Year’s Eve

  January

  February

  March

  April

  The Fires

  The Rains

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Two men are taking Nicholas away. I see them through the police-car window. One takes his shoulder, one his arm. They swallow his skin, like mouths.

  Nagodeallah, she fears them. She wriggles and cries on my knees. She grows heavy as a goat. Goggo says I hold Nagode too tight. She says: ‘Eh, boy, let her loose. Let her cry like she should.’ But Goggo knows nothing. Her mouth has no teeth. All she does is cry for us and lick the water from her gums. But Nagodeallah is mine now. So I squeeze her. I say shush, like Mama would.

  Nicholas has not seen us yet. He looks back, towards the runway. At the end is the aeroplane, waiting. Big, like a beast. Like the horse from Mama’s stories, the white horse with wings. A knight’s horse for Nicholas, to fly away from us.

  Those men have angry faces. I know it. Because I am angry too. They tell me that in the special lessons. They ask me to draw everything that happened. But I could only draw the well. Your well, Nicholas. The one you stole like Robin Hood, that you said would save us all. I drew how it was when I looked down inside it – big, and black. These men are big and white.

  I hear one man speak. He says Nicholas is lucky. He says it like this: ‘You don’t know how lucky you are, mate.’ Mate. Nicholas uses this word too. It means ‘my friend’.

  But these men are not his friends. They have locked his hands together. And his face is white, white as the spirits. When he came to us, he was pink. Mama, she used to laugh at him. But the fires burned him away. They burned us all away and left only bones.

  When the policewoman came to tell us about Nicholas, Goggo said: ‘Praise Allah. Good riddance.’ She has not forgiven him. She wants blood in her mouth not tears. Sometimes, I see the blood in my dreams. I see them, Mama, Nagode and Adeya and the others, and their cheeks are running red.

  It was Adeya who made me come. The police lady said: ‘He asks for you, JoJo, every day. Will you not see him?’

  Goggo spat. But Adeya, she came to stand by me. She grew so tall, as tall as Mama. After the fires I told her: ‘You can come to live with us, like you are our sister. And I will care for you the same as Nagode.’ And Adeya, she said: ‘Yes, JoJo. But when we are grown, remember that I am not your sister.’

  So I said yes to the policewoman, for Adeya. The word in my mouth was no but yes came rolling past my teeth. So the police car fetched us at first light. It had electric windows. I wound them down, so the wind could feel Nagode’s hair.

  Now the policewoman stands by my window, waiting. The car door is closed. And I am afraid to open it. Doors are tests, Baba said. We choose to pass or stay. I do not know if the right way is through or back. But I am a man now. So I must choose.

  I lift my hand and open the door. Nagode holds me as we climb into the light. The policewoman steps back. And then Nicholas, he sees me.

  He says: ‘JoJo.’

  I want to say: No way, Nicholas. No, mate. We have nothing for you, Nagode and me. We came only to see you go.

  But my throat hurts and the words are stuck in it. My arms shake, and I cannot hold Nagode. I give her to the police lady. One day, my arms will be stronger. One day, Nagode will speak. On that day, I will tell her our stories. I will tell her about Mama and Baba. I will tell her about you, Nicholas, and The Boys, about the fires and the well. When we are grown, we will still remember. That is what I have to say to you, Nicholas. We will remember.

  Will you remember, too? When they take you from here, will you think of us, and the things we did together? Like when we built our castle. It was great, that castle. Strong, with a moat, and towers, and the flag Mama made for it. You taught me how to make it strong. Each wall pushes and pulls against the others, you said. If even the smallest falls, then all become weaker. But together they are balanced. This is how the building finds its strength.

  I want to tell you, Nicholas, that I understand this now. I do not need your lessons any more. I go to a good school. I am the best student. Each night I sit with Adeya and we study your language of numbers. Adeya, she says the numbers speak to us. Like the spirits, Nicholas. Sometimes the spirits speak to me still. They push and pull me inside. It hurts and I cry when Adeya cannot see. But I, too, will become strong one day.

  ‘Please,’ you say. ‘Please.’ And now I am crying. Because I am not ready for you to go. I do not forgive you yet, Nicholas. I have important things to tell you.

  But now there is no time, they are pulling you away from us. So it must be my turn, Nicholas, it must be me who saves us. I will stop these men with their strong hands. Because we promised, Nicholas. We promised we would stay together.

  I open my mouth to call you. But the words are stones and my heart is deep water. The police lady pulls my shoulder back as I put my hand out to you, and I pull forward with all my strength.

  And then I feel it, the balance inside. I can speak your name. And you look around one more time; you are turning from the big men and the jet plane back to us.

  Do we see each other, you and me? Do you see my hand, and what I have there? Because I know, Nicholas. I know what I must do. I know how to finish it.

  Dry Season

  The airport terminal doors swung open; Nick stepped through tempered glass into blinding daylight. Two porters reached for his suitcase as he passed through, palms sand-dry, their eyes dark with need.

  He rested his back against cool brick, breathing in the afternoon’s ragged clamour. The porters had moved on, drawn away by richer opportunities, their skinny forms swallowed in a heated blur of bodies. A woman brushed past him on the narrow pavement, shoulders swelling from a tight jungle-green dress, matching fabric crowning her temples, arms opened wide like a carnivorous flower. She squealed as she reached into the melée of expectant faces and trundling baggage, pulling someone into a strong embrace – a mother perhaps, or a sister. Nick watched, transfixed by their joy, the fierce press of skin against skin, the careless flow of tears.

  Ahead, the airport road curved away from him. Cars flowed along it bumper-to-bumper, a slow-moving river under a bottomless sky. Exhaust fumes circled lazily over nameless trees, their dark flowers collapsing onto the roadside.

  Purple cloudbanks curled and deepened on the horizon, over jammed clusters of houses, red-roofed and low. The city centre was just visible beyond them, a blurred shimmer of glass and steel reflecting the coming storm. The sky seemed to grow as Nick looked up, becoming vaster and heavier. Waves of wet heat pulsed downwards, soaking through his shirt. He felt his skin rejoicing, drinking them in, as if quenching a lifetime of thirst.

  Nine hours earlier, he’d been cushioned by the soft ascent from Heathrow, the sky racing soundlessly from grey to blue. It was the longest trip he’d ever taken, and when they’d first burst through the clouds into the bright void above it had taken Nick’s breath away, filling him with awe. Here at last was the feeling he’d been hoping for: an old chain finally snapping, clear air opening between his past and future.

  The jolt of touchdown had woken him from sleep, catapulting him into an altogether different world. They had lowered steps
onto the runway and he’d walked out, dazed under the curdling sky, through the confident jostle of bodies at the baggage carousel and out through customs into this new daylight, with its miasma of car fumes, cigarettes, perfume and sweat. Loud smiles and bright voices overshadowed him on every side. What are you doing here? they seemed to demand. He had no easy answer to give, even to himself; it made him feel young, insignificant, and above all not ready.

  He closed his eyes, shaky, suddenly grateful for the wall at his back, sensing people rushing by on their way to the taxi ranks. He felt the sky’s heat spreading inside him, the dense closeness of rain overhead, probably sweeping in from warm ocean waters just beyond the city. Their rhythm pounded in his temples, green waves beating onto a wide, white shore. But then a tiny, cooling thought blew into him: he knew that ocean. He’d watched it countless times as a small boy, four thousand miles away on its northerly edge, under a sky grey as marbles, digging clams out of the sand between stinging rocks, the cold a blue knife raking bare feet. Somehow even then, before he was old enough to imagine what lay beyond the horizon, or that there could be a beyond, the hidden arc between that moment and this one had started to form.

  The memory steadied his breathing. A sign, he thought – a turning point in the story, a straight road glimpsed through the haze. His excitement woke again, a warm rush. Look out of the window at exactly noon, he’d told Kate, at their goodbye. I’ll be waving right above you, au revoir at thirty-five thousand feet. Her face had been pale in the flicker of the departure board, one fist outlined against the blue wool of her pocket. Like Superman, she’d replied with a strained smile, as his lips touched the almond-scented skin of her cheek.

  That kiss lingered in his mouth; the taste of guilt. When he’d first confessed his plan to her, her laughter had been sympathetic, the compassion of the sane for the deluded. But under the departure board, her hand had clutched his arm in a last, anxious appeal. It’s not too late, you know.

  Too late for what? he’d asked gently, torn between admiration for her determined composure, self-reproach for the hurt it concealed and desperation to be gone. He’d felt her fingers pressing through his shirt, as if she could penetrate his skin to reach the many doubts still lurking beneath. The curtain of dark hair he’d parted on their first night together a year ago, falling shining and straight across her face, was swept up tight into a ponytail, betraying a tremble of mouth and chin. Her engagement ring winked up at him like a third eye. To change your mind, she’d replied. To stay here with me, where you belong.

  ‘Nicholas? Hey! Pardon – you’re Nicholas?’

  Nick opened his eyes into a present full of warm light. A hand was reaching out to him; he followed it up to a stranger’s face, vaguely familiar from a grainy snapshot in his deployment folder. Steel-rimmed glasses beneath an anxiously receding hairline, the forehead a worn pink over watery eyes. Pale lashes blinked rapidly against the glare, like a burrowing creature’s. Nick had a sudden memory of moles ripping through his mother’s lawn, their pointed noses testing the air as she sat motionless by her easel.

  ‘Jean-Philippe?’

  ‘J.P., please. Welcome! At last. No problems with the visa? They can be devils, you know.’ He glanced sideways at Nick. ‘But look at you! You’re not like I imagined. No offence.’

  Nick laughed. ‘None taken. It’s Nick, by the way.’

  J.P. dragged the suitcase through the melée of waiting taxis. Bodies buffeted Nick, warm and bright with sweat. His senses were jumbled: corn roasting on a roadside stall filled his mouth with the taste of mellow gold; the air was smoky green at the back of his throat – with something else, darkly sweet, like sewage.

  They reached a brown sedan among the chaos of double-parked cars, exhausts belching fumes. Behind the dust-smeared windscreen a crucifix dangled off coloured beads – strings of chocolate, grass, gold and blood.

  ‘I mean, you’re younger than I thought,’ J.P. said as he opened the boot, hoisting Nick’s suitcase inside. ‘Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight?’

  ‘Thirty.’

  ‘They usually send them older. The mid-career crisis, you know. Ha!’

  The car’s seats were stripped bare, metal bones shining through. Nick cranked down the window to let in the sluggish air. Small children wandered through the traffic, clutching packs of gum and rotting baskets piled with fruit and flies. Most scattered at the blare of car horns. But some pressed in, thin fists hammering on the glass.

  J.P. started the engine. ‘But anyway, here you are.’ Buildings loomed ahead, black-streaked and crumbling. ‘Young blood.’ Music crackled to life from the radio cassette player – a full-throated wail over sax and drums that pulsed through Nick like wingbeats. J.P.’s hands tapped its rhythm on the wheel. ‘Femi – you like him? He’s a god round here, so say yes if they ask. It’s his latest. Mind Your Own Business. Good advice for our nice new nineties, no? Personally I prefer Ali Farka Touré. The greatest blues man on earth – but from a few borders north of here. Oh, they’ll tell you: this is all West Africa, borders are just colonial importations, like French and English – and they have a point, mind you. But when it comes to music, football – the important things in life – the patriotism here is crazier than Europe. So I keep my opinions to myself.’

  The lyrics were English, Nick could tell – and yet he couldn’t quite catch their meaning as they slipped past, sucked through the window into the whirlwind of street noise: the cry of hawkers over a boom-box’s tinny pulse, long-tailed birds piping from a passing tree, the dark rumbling sky overhead. He took a deep breath, conscious of J.P.’s briskly tapping thumbs, of the importance of first impressions. Don’t look so overwhelmed, idiot. This has to work out.

  ‘I don’t know much about music, I’m afraid,’ he replied, taking refuge in honesty. ‘Catholic mother – I was brought up on hymns.’

  ‘No Geldof? No Live Aid? I thought that was a basic requirement for you British.’

  ‘I missed the Live Aid thing. Too busy studying for the second stage of my architecture qualification. My girlfriend loves U2, if that qualifies?’

  ‘U2, my god. They grow up on hymns here, too. In the south, anyway. Not in the north, where you’ll be. There, it’s mostly allahu akbar. Well, by the time you go home, you’ll know what to sing where. And what do you think of this warm welcome you’re getting? Femi . . . all this sunshine. Nice for the swimming pool. But not so nice for the farmers.’ Sweat pooled on the Frenchman’s temples. ‘The rains failed.’

  Nick’s hotel, booked for one night before his journey north, was fronted in mottled colonial brick. Black birds squatted on its casements around a central swimming pool. J.P. went across to the bar, to negotiate with the waitress for a drink.

  Nick waited for him by the water. Red flowers fell from overhanging trees onto the listless surface. He watched, hypnotised, as the water swallowed them, petal by petal. His pale reflection swam between them. Such a sad little fellow, his mother used to say. That was in the early days, when her arms would still wrap around him, baptising him in warmth. He caught the ghost scent of paint on her hand as she stroked his hair. Don’t give the boy these ridiculous ideas, Mary, his father would tell her, back turned to them as he worked on patient records, his disdain cold as a knife. For a moment Nick imagined a grey figure materialising beneath the water’s cloudy surface, before he wiped his hands over his eyes.

  J.P. came back with two cold beers and Nick’s recruitment papers. He flicked through them with a whistle. ‘You did a lot already, eh? Engineer, architect?’

  ‘Structural engineer.’ His voice sounded thin in the heavy air. The beer was malty, with a metallic aftertaste. ‘My firm built public spaces and infrastructure in London.’

  ‘That’s great. Working for the Iron Lady. Vive le capitalisme! Lots of money for that, I bet. Happy mama, happy papa, happy wife.’

  ‘Fiancée. And my father wasn’t so happy.’ Talking of him felt bold, like an exorcism. ‘He wanted me to be a doctor, like him.’<
br />
  ‘Even more money.’

  ‘Not in his practice. He was a local GP, a country doctor.’ Now Nick regretted the conversation. The subject was still too sharp – a splinter buried deep.

  ‘So you give it all up to come here?’ J.P. raised his eyebrows. ‘Is the fiancée a pain in the ass?’

  Nick laughed despite himself. ‘It’s just a sabbatical. A year, that’s it. Then I head back home.’

  He remembered saying the same thing to the recruitment panel, after all the exams and application essays. We need to know you can last the year, they’d said. That you’re not going to drop out because you’re too lonely, or it’s too hot, or the sky is too strange and you can’t sleep.

  And he’d given them his too-plausible assurances – the same ones he’d served to Kate, as she stood frozen in their kitchen, a cork pulled halfway out of the bottle of Saint-Émilion. I want to do something meaningful, he’d said. Before I settle down – before we start our whole life together. It was meant to reassure, but he felt the unsayable truth hovering just beneath – that he could feel that life solidifying around him, trapping him into one of a billion diligent, purposeless existences that faded in the living.

  He’d taken Kate’s hand, her engagement ring cold and solid between them as she tried to pull him back to her. But everything’s already organized – I ordered stationery for the invites – we’ve started writing our vows. The argument had run on into the small hours, exhausting them both. She knew he was afraid, she’d said; a lifetime is a lifetime after all, and she was scared too – but running away to another continent was no solution. He’d countered that he wasn’t running away but preparing himself; he’d be back in just a few months, ready to make good on every promise, more able to be the man she wanted him to be. Finally, she’d asked, bewildered: Is this all because of your father? She’d thought that his father’s death had filled him with the helium of wild ideas, that he risked floating off unless she could pull him back to their safe, defined spaces; evening meals and weekend escapes, the wedding plans taking shape with colour schemes and honeymoon brochures.