Yet his words, gift, and daughter of sunlight, were a lingering chorus as the lengthening shadow of the trees absorbed him.
The darkness of the forest was suddenly very close. The memory of its strangeness stirred again, fresh: and with it came that moment on Kisiri: the throng of movement, that half-heard voice – now it seemed to thread among the cries of the wading birds distant on the reef. She almost expected to see someone walking there. The two experiences – forest and island – were mixing unnervingly in her mind; but they’d happened miles apart, separate, no reasons to think they were the same, were there?
She made an effort to push the silly, frightening thoughts from her head. The old man had gone. She stooped and collected up the bundle of firewood. She threw a last glance at the forest.
Then she went down to where Ben had managed to peg the tent, secure though lopsided, in the soft dry sand beyond reach of a rising tide.
‘I’ll try to get a fire going,’ she called to Jack, dumping her armful of driftwood and kneeling to sort the twigs from the larger chunks.
Grace stepped so silently that only her shadow on the sand alerted Ally. The little girl crouched down to watch intently as Ally laid the wigwam of small sticks around dry seaweed, put chunks of driftwood nearby, and sat back on her heels.
‘You do make your fire,’ Grace remarked.
‘OK, d’you think?’ Ally asked. ‘Will it light?’
Grace poked the seaweed tighter into the middle, considering the arrangement with a small, determined frown. She picked up a dry mangrove pod from the beach beside her, and dropped it on. Then, ‘It is good.’
She was nursing a small leaf-wrapped bundle in her lap, and now she peeled back the covering and held it out for Ally’s inspection. A ring of small shells lay there, creamy inside, a mottling of brown and ivory on the smooth, curved backs.
‘Pretty.’ Ally stroked one.
‘Collins and Dedan do take them to the hotel. They do get money and go to market for eat,’ Grace’s voice dropped to a whisper, ‘but I give you.’
‘I haven’t got money here, but I’ll buy one tomorrow, promise,’ said Ally, meaning it, because she’d understood that Grace was saying that if they sold the shells they could buy food.
‘No!’ Grace retorted hotly. ‘I give.’ She held one out insistently.
‘Tourists like you’ll get the reef stripped bare,’ Jack murmured to Ally, bending to drop another armful of wood. ‘I hope they’re not picking up everything—’
‘They’re just trying to live,’ Ally said quickly, not wanting Grace to hear his disapproval. ‘What else can they do?’ She took the little girl’s offered shell and cupped it in her hands, smiling at her.
Jack grunted, and straightened to look at Joseph tearing along the beach towards the tent. Two older boys followed.
‘Dedan!’ Grace leapt up and danced about as the first one neared at a steady, bent-kneed jog across the sand, also going straight for Ben and the tent.
Collins, on the other hand, was trailing warily. He’s like a little fox, Ally decided. Close up, he was surprisingly young. Older than Joseph, but a bit younger than Ben – six, seven at the most. Young, bonily thin, with a hard, bright stare that was difficult to look away from.
She held her ground. ‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Hello, madam,’ he answered.
‘I’m not madam, I’m Ally.’
He made a twisting movement with his mouth – was it dismissal, disapproval, or just acknowledgement? He said, ‘I am Collins Karanga. I am leader of the Boat Crew.’
At his name for the group, invented no doubt since their occupation of Shanza’s old boat, she had to stop herself from smiling. He’d think she was laughing at him, and she wasn’t. To mask it, she stood up, brushing powdery sand from her knees, more than a little thrown by his continuing, deliberate scrutiny. Is he really much older than he looks? Just masked by his tiny, half-starved skinny body?
To break the silence, she said, ‘You’re going to Tundani? Grace told me.’ Now Grace was running to where Joseph and Dedan were rolling back tent doors and lifting flaps to reveal netting windows. With a yelp of glee, she squirmed in, her face appearing dimly through the netting.
‘We will go to Tundani. We will come back.’ This too was a kind of challenge. ‘I ask Mzee Shaibu for work here, in his place. We are very good at many works. Mzee Shaibu is thinking. I am thinking.’ He stared away. Turned back – that look again – tone changing, ‘Why are you here? It is not your place! Tourists!’
‘Well, yes, but . . .’ Is it a good thing if we are, or a bad thing? ‘We’re staying with our aunt—’
‘Hospital, I know this. Two years working!’
‘How? I mean, how d’you know two?’
‘Easy to know,’ with scorn. He changed tack. ‘I see you go there,’ pointing at Kisiri. ‘What is there?’ He ducked as a missile shot past. It fell in the sand and rolled to a stop.
‘Hey, sorry, sorry.’ Ben ran past, retrieved it, glanced apologetically at Collins.
‘It is our football,’ Collins told him.
‘Look,’ Ben showed Ally, ‘they made it themselves!’ It was plastic bags wrapped round each other like onion skins, hundreds of them, the whole shape firm and round and the size of a football, though lumpy on one side.
‘Is a good ball!’ Collins stepped forward and snatched it away.
‘Didn’t say it wasn’t, just saying how you did it!’ retorted Ben, aggrieved.
Collins eyed him. Then abruptly he threw the makeshift ball, and Ben caught it and hurled it back, Collins tossed it to Dedan, Dedan kicked it down the beach, Joseph hared after it, and within minutes a chaotic, noisy game had spread, numbers swelling with the first arrivals from the village scrambling down Ras Chui. Collins, abandoning his interrogation of Ally, pelted loudly through the thick of it.
Ally scanned the arriving faces for Leli’s, failed to find it. She made herself busy arranging things near the fire.
Eshe and Koffi took charge, one by one welcoming each new girl or boy arriving for the camp feast, presenting them with a flourish to Ally. Each ceremoniously delivered their donation to her: hard-boiled eggs, cassava, fruit, small sweet coconut cakes, goat’s milk in a large metal jug, another with richly sweetened lime juice, everything added to the growing pile. Lumbwi sauntered in, with the brothers Pili and Mosi, pairs of fish slung over poles on their shoulders. Then, to Ally’s relief, Huru and Leli topped the crest of Raz Chui, and ran down the rock path. They dropped maize cobs, fresh coconut, a bundle of driftwood onto the food pile.
But Leli was instantly caught up in the ball game with everyone else, even Grace, who skipped about on the edge, streaking to kidnap the ball when she could and having to be cajoled and bribed to return it.
Ally took refuge in watching over the cooking, seeing how Eshe and Koffi set the fish to grill on sticks over the flames, how they arranged the maize, cassava, papaya roasting below.
The talk was of the school, closed for days, even a week.
‘The D.O. came,’ Eshe remarked. ‘To see the digging machines and the field next door. He is angry!’
‘Yesterday – maize and bananas grow there,’ Koffi expanded for Ally. ‘Today, big holes and earth. Growing things – poof! All gone! No one tells the D.O. the road is coming there. Who changes it? When? How can this happen and not even tell the teacher of the school in the middle? Oh-oh, she is angry!’
‘And listen, listen,’ Eshe interrupted, ‘strangers ask Teacher about places to bring cars to the sea, but not any place near a village! They want to hide away, everyone is saying this!’
‘You should tell the policeman,’ Ally suggested. ‘Inspector Rutere. He’s investigating. Everything.’ She reported his comments yesterday about poaching and big gangs in the north.
Koffi shook her head. ‘It is not that. No big animal
s anywhere here.’
‘The hotel people, for sure.’ Eshe made a clicking sound with her tongue against her teeth. ‘They want to bring tourists everywhere! My sister sees the man with the stupid big hat again – that one who comes here in the shiny red car.’ She sniffed disparagingly. ‘This man marches about in Tundani hotel as if he is Big Man there. My sister walks to see the hotel because she wants to work as receptionist. If she cannot work there in Tundani, she will go far away like Leli’s brother Shaaban. She does not tell my mother, because my mother remembers Uzuri, and is afraid.’
‘Why afraid?’ Ally asked, confused. ‘What’s uzuri?’
Eshe didn’t answer. Koffi reached over and took her friend’s hand, cradling it for a moment. ‘Uzuri – our good, good friend. Beautiful like her name!’ she informed Ally. ‘She went to the city to live with her auntie and go to a big school. Then police came to tell us she was walking on the road and a lorry killed her. They have not found the person who did this. Now all the mothers and fathers fear these places with fast cars and too many people who are just strangers to each other.’
A gloomy silence descended. The fire hissed and settled with a shower of little sparks, and Eshe inspected the cooking fiercely, poking with a long stick. Then she sat back on her heels, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘But you know, Pili’s big sister is learning to be a nurse at Kipungani College. And Halima’s brother is earning good money in the post office over there in Marafa.’ In an instant the talk turned to those who had escaped Shanza or another village, and would not be coming back.
‘Why?’ Ally questioned. ‘I mean, why’s everyone trying to leave?’
‘To go where we can do things!’ Koffi said.
‘But you don’t have to leave? For good, I mean? It’s beautiful here.’
‘It is just our houses. You look with the eye of a tourist.’ Koffi turned the corners of her mouth down.
It was not said rudely, but Ally felt it as a slap. She looked away. No one wants to stay? Even in this sultry evening, in the waning light, it was beautiful – olive green sea, gulls drifting above the incoming tide and flickering with final sunbeams through the palms.
Well, it’s true. I am a tourist! I am just seeing it for a holiday. But then Leli filled her head, eager, telling her about everything, showing, explaining, proud—
‘Me,’ Eshe’s voice cut in, ‘I am not like my sister.’ She patted Ally’s hand as if recognizing her discomfort. ‘I will not work in these rich hotels. No, no, no! I will be a lawyer and put a notice on people’s islands and special places to stop those ones who should not go there! I will have a friend who is a good policeman, a powerful policeman, more than Inspector Rutere, and he will arrest them!’
‘Ho! You are full of big stories,’ retorted Koffi.
‘You! I will get the higher examinations, you see. And I will come back to live in our beautiful place and defend it from people like you who just want to get rich quick!’ Eshe leaned and gave her friend a pinch, which produced the desired squawk and shrieking laughter. Satisfied, she turned to Ally. ‘And you, what will you do?’
‘Oh! I . . . I don’t know.’ Her vagueness struck her as pathetic, and Makena’s words about the ruin came to mind: it opened a little door in my soul. She thought: everything – Shanza, Carole’s house, Makena’s stories, Mzee Kitwana, Kisiri, Leli – opens a little door in my soul. She tried the words out again, liking them. Leli opens a door in my soul.
Is he ever going to talk to me? Not a word, properly, yet.
Eshe had caught her looking at Leli. He was running after Pili, who had the ball now. With a chuckle, she tapped Ally’s hand.
‘Leli will be your slave for ever if you let him tell you about this place!’
Ally felt her cheeks flush.
‘Oh, oh! Do not let Leli’s mother see you look at him too much or make him your slave.’ Koffi rolled her eyes at Ally. ‘Oh, no! The mother wants Eshe to marry him!’
Eshe snorted. ‘Koffi, nonsense! You talk nonsense, you hear me, Koffi? You have no thoughts in your brain except marrying. We leave Leli to be Ally’s good friend without this stupid story!’
Ally reddened. Koffi ignored Eshe and went on seamlessly, ‘And your little brother and your big brother? What do they like?’ No doubt, though, that Koffi was looking only at Jack. He’d subsided near the fire, and was learning a drumbeat on the bottom of a pan from Lumbwi and Collins.
‘Ask him,’ Ally said mischievously, relieved to have the focus taken from her. She’d spoken loudly, and Jack heard. He glanced up, met Koffi’s gaze, flicked his eyes away again, bristled with self-consciousness.
‘I will do this, I will ask him!’ answered Koffi. ‘Most definitely I will go and ask him.’
‘I will travel in the air to Europe!’ Another girl sprawled on the sand and gazed up at a plane rumbling by, lights winking through the dusk. ‘I will visit you in England. But not stay. England is too cold, and you fight about football, I see it in the newspapers.’ She waved a limp hand at the remnants of the game, now involving dives into the rising tide to retrieve the ball before it bobbed out of sight, or sank.
‘We all visit you, Eshe, Jina and me. And we will be very sure to visit your brother!’ declared Koffi, and all three roared with laughter, Jack now very much aware of every word, his discomfort intensifying as Koffi hauled her two friends to their feet, the three linked arms and strolled towards him.
Left alone by the fire, Ally felt suddenly and strangely bleak. Is Eshe Leli’s girlfriend, really? Stupid to be bothered! I’ve only known him four days. Three weeks till I go again. Four thousand miles away.
She couldn’t imagine it.
Eshe shouted something at a knot of boys running from the water, Leli among them. Leli shouted back. Swahili.
Now everyone was leaving the water, fetching food, flopping on the sands, chattering. Eshe’s arms were round Leli and Mosi’s shoulders. Koffi and Jina were sprawled on the beach, listening to Jack as he tried to look cool and unaffected, and went on drumming over their chatter and laughter.
Ally was hot and cramped and stupidly miserable. Not even a whisper of a breeze, moonrise blotched by a mosaic of cloud thickening ominously towards the horizon. Maybe rain would break and everyone would rush away and she’d never ever talk to Leli—
He’s avoiding me. I’ve got it all wrong. He doesn’t really want to talk to me, not specially. He’s just being welcoming. It’s the way he is. I’m not reading anything right, how can I when half the time it’s all in a language I can’t speak!
She felt, overwhelmingly, solitary. Even Grace was absorbed, drawing patterns in the sand and hopping through them, chanting, Joseph closing and opening the tent, demanding a password for entry, Ben still splashing about in the water with Huru.
She got up and moved away from the fire. She sat down again, back turned firmly against the looming wall of forest trees and sands sweeping into gloom beyond reach of the firelight. She gazed out over the black sea.
In an instant Leli was in front of her, offering a drink from the can Lumbwi’d brought. She tried not to show the jolt of surprise, the nerves that shot through her. She took a sip, watched him jog down the beach to hand the can on, come back to drop onto the sand and lie back, propped on his elbows. He smiled up at her.
Did he avoid me only as long as Koffi and Eshe were around?
She became light with something like relief, and something else, headier and unfamiliar, that made everything she wanted to say well up and pour out in a torrent. ‘I really wanted to come to Shanza yesterday, but we got back too late. I wanted – oh, to know what you think . . . you know, on Kisiri? It was strange, wasn’t it, Leli? I didn’t imagine it – Jack says I did, but I didn’t . . .’
‘It is what I tell you,’ he said simply. ‘It is Kisiri. Kisiri speaks.’
She tried to digest this. After a minute, s
he said, ‘We went to some ruins.’
Leli rolled onto one elbow and pointed north beyond Shanza. ‘That way?’
She nodded. ‘There was an arch on a hill, and broken walls, lots of dunes . . . a long way – Carole took us in the car.’
‘I have been to this place,’ Leli murmured. ‘When I was just very small, with my father and uncle, in the ngalawa. Teacher is saying she wants to take everyone there soon, but there is no money to get a bus to go this way.’ He paused, staring out at sea for a moment. ‘It is a long time, but . . . I remember it . . . it was . . . very silent . . . it . . .’ He seemed to run out of words.
He began again, ‘You like this place? We must go in the ngalawa together, and look properly! This would be a very good thing to do, you and me?’ She smiled happily at him, and he at her. ‘I am thinking now,’ he went on, still gazing at her, ‘it is a bit like the story that Mzee Kitwana will tell you about Fumo and Zawati—’
‘Yes! At the ruins there was an archaeologist who knew all about places like—’
Leli nodded enthusiastically. ‘Makena! I know this lady. A good friend of Mzee Kitwana. She is in Shanza yesterday with the inspector policeman to ask about the visitor boats—’
Abruptly he sat up, staring at the water.
She looked where he looked. Saw nothing.
‘What?’ she said.
He pointed at Kisiri.
She saw the island, smudged by the darkness but its outline still visible: long and low nearest the mainland, rising to the high coral bluff facing the open sea.
Nothing else.
‘I can’t see—’
Then she can: movement, a quiver of shadow between the mainland and Kisiri, here, there, from left to right, merging with Kisiri’s gloom. And again – a darker swirl, travelling across the black water.
Then a sliver of light from the rising moon slips through the clouds and throws a pale path across the sea; clearly, crossing it, is a stroke of black on the water. Then a second, third, fourth, a long curving tail of them . . .
Song Beneath the Tides Page 9
