The Lubetkin Legacy (35 page)

Violet awakes to absolute darkness and a smell of something cool and antiseptic close to her face. Then she moves her head and a streak of light shows at the bottom of her vision. If she tilts her chin up she can see a low section of her surroundings. She realises the darkness is only from a bandage around her forehead which partly covers her eyes. One hand is immobile, encased in plaster and fixed across her chest with a strap. With the other hand, she gingerly adjusts the bandage a centimetre upwards, giving herself another metre of perspective. She is lying under a white sheet in a small white room. A bright patch of sunlight falls on the floor at the foot of the bed. She tries to remember … she remembers the three men, the sack over her head, the square window, the narrow room, the buckets, the pain, the thud of the chair falling over. Then … it's as though her memory is on a loop that repeats those same images again and again but will not wind forward however hard she tries.

The sound of a door opening behind her makes her tense up. Are they coming back for her? Without moving her head, she watches two white shoes advance into the room. Two small white shoes on skinny brown legs, carrying with them a familiar voice.

‘
Mpenzi
, my baby, who done this to you? I thought I would never see you again! I going crazy with worry.' Her grandmother's voice is strident with relief.

Behind the bandage she feels tears water her eyes and prick the back of her nose. She wants to surrender to the storm
building up inside her, to be comforted in her grandmother's arms, but the bandages immobilise her.

‘I'm all right, Nyanya. Shush. I'm all right now.'

The door creaks again, and this time a pair of pretty red high-heeled sandals trip across the floor to her bedside. Lynette sits on the edge of the bed, takes her good hand and gives it a squeeze.

‘Thank God, Violet. Thank God we got you out. I warned you to be careful.'

‘Thank God I called you for your lunch,' Njoki adds. ‘When I heard you cry out, I phoned the police straight away. Then I phoned Lynette. Oh,
mpenzi
, I thought you was murdered!'

‘Ssh. Not so loud.' A soft woman's voice she doesn't recognise, maybe the nurse. ‘She had a shock. She only just woken up. She need to stay calm.'

‘It was nothing to do with the police,' Lynette says. ‘They said you was probably with your boyfriend and they couldn't do nothing. Wait another day, they said.'

‘Another day and you been dead,' adds Njoki in a dramatic voice.

‘On Monday morning after Njoki phoned me, I called up the anti-corruption bureau and I told them about those papers you showed me.'

‘You told
me
to be careful, Lynette.'

‘I was careful. I gave them a false name. At first they weren't interested. The man I talked to said they investigated Nzangu before and he was clean. I wasn't surprised they said that, but now they knew we were on his trail. So I put the phone down.'

‘Then …?' She tries to raise her head, sending a shooting pain through her shoulder and arm.

‘Then someone else rang me back from the bureau. They
must have traced my number. He said I must come to the bureau right away, they just got some fax from England that confirmed the same things I told them. They arrested Nzangu. They wanted to know where your papers were so you could help them with their inquiry.'

‘But weren't you scared it was a trick?' She remembers Queenie's strange phone call. Did they get her too?

‘I was scared like a
sungura
, but Archie took me over there and he waited outside. I said you was British citizen kidnapped, and if you disappear questions will be asked in English Parliament. That put fear into them.'

‘How did you find me?' She remembers the sack over her head, the long bumpy ride on the floor of the taxi-van, the echoing room full of buckets. ‘I thought no one would ever rescue me and I would die in that place.'

‘When they caught him, Nzangu talk-talk non-stop like a
kasuku
. He told them he got this warehouse full of gear out near Mlolongo where they could have took you. Maybe he got scared they killed you and he be done for murdering a British citizen.'

‘Oh! How I started to cry when they told me they found you! Lying on the floor tied to the chair like a chicken, all covered in blood!' Njoki lets out a wail. ‘My little girl! I thought I lost you same like I lost Jo.'

The nurse intervenes. ‘Sshh. Quiet. Let her rest.'

‘I'm her grandmother, you know!' Njoki retorts. ‘I lost my dear husband to this same
mfisadi
. They left him by the road for dead. Now they try to steal my grandchild away!'

‘It's okay, Nyanya Njoki. I'm still alive.' She grits her teeth and heaves herself up until she is sitting with her back against the iron frame of the bed. There is something she needs to ask. ‘That fax from England, Lynette – did it have a name on it?'

‘I can't remember. Gideon? Giles? Gilbert? I think it began with G.'

‘Gillian?'

‘Could be. Does it matter now we found you?' Lynette can't stop dimpling her shiny round cheeks.

Njoki's voice is shrill and querulous. ‘Main thing is to catch the
mfisadi
over here. The ones that got Jo, and now they nearly got you! Oh God, when I saw you lying like dead and covered in blood –'

‘You better go now,' the nurse interrupts. Njoki is holding her so tight she has to be prised away. ‘You making her stressed. We need to change the dressings, then she can sleep.'

The nurse offers her two tablets with a glass of water and unwinds the bandage from her head. ‘It's looking better. Nothing too serious. Just a big bruise on the temple. You'll be black and blue for a few days. The arm is broken in three places. That will take a bit longer. How does it feel?'

‘Mmm. It hurts, but it's more the shock.' Every bone in her body jangles with pain when she moves, but beyond the pain she feels contentment that glows in her like sunlight. She's still alive, and she's done something that needed to be done, her aching body tells her. ‘I feared I was going to die in there. They'd dump my body by the roadside, and nobody would find those papers.'

‘Try to get some sleep now,' says the nurse. ‘You want me to draw the curtains?'

‘No. No, leave them open.'

She slides back down on the pillows and gazes out of the window. Her eyelids are drowsy. The nurse must have given her a sedative. Through the square of glass she can see the tops of the trees in the hospital garden. Close by the window, the gracious arch of a Nandi Flame tree heavy with blossom burns
bright against the sky. A fat grey
njiwa
flutters its wings and settles among the flowers, cooing its heart out. It reminds her of … something … what does it remind her of?

Njoki and Lynette kiss her and leave arm in arm, small white shoes, pretty red sandals, tap-tapping together across the polished floor.

As soon as the credits rolled, people started shuffling towards the exit of the cinema, dragging their feet on the worn carpet. Stacey and I waited and topped up our glasses with the wine we had bought at the bar (‘Oh, go on then, just a drop!'). Science fiction is not my favourite genre, and I found the storyline was over-complicated and the helmets obscured George Clooney and Sandra Bullock's faces. I was more captivated by Stacey's profile as she sat beside me in the dark, the curve of her cheek and chin, the nape of her neck where the fine coppery hairs curled, her sweet perfume, and beneath the perfume the faint nutty scent of her skin. She was wearing the same tight-fitting green Oxfam dress, which no longer seemed too tight but made her look sensual and shapely like a leafy Venus. My hand had strayed down in between the top buttons and she let it rest there.

‘That ending was so beautiful, didn't you think?'
Sniffle sniffle
. ‘I didn't know whether it was real or whether it was a dream.'

She leaned closer to me, hunting in her bag for a tissue. A teardrop hung on her cheek, gleaming in the darkness like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear.

‘Mm,' I replied. It had been my idea, from a perverse mixture of motives, to see this film, but the special effects had made me feel queasy in a way that brought to mind slatki with vodka.

‘But I think I prefer the theatre,' she sniffed. ‘It's much more
real.
I used to be quite a George Clooney fan because we were both born in 1961, but recently I've been noticing how old he looks.'

‘Old? He's only …'

‘Don't you think he's a bit overrated?'

‘Actually, Stacey …' I took a sip of wine and paused to savour my moment of triumph, ‘I think, in fact, George Clooney's quite a good actor.'

As the house lights rose and the real world came into focus around us, we stayed in our seats and drained the last few drops of lukewarm Sauvignon Blanc into our glasses. Suddenly Stacey started weeping again as though a floodgate of emotion had been opened.

‘It reminds me of how I felt when Monty died. I kept hoping he wasn't really dead.'

Was there a note of accusation in her voice?

‘It wasn't my fault, you know, Stacey. I tried to grab his lead, but he just dashed across the road. The van appeared out of nowhere.' I put my arm around her. ‘White van of destiny meets cute little dog.'

‘You took his body to the pub and got drunk.'

‘We had to give him a proper send-off.'

‘I'm not blaming you, Bertie. I'm just telling you how I feel.' Something in her voice told me she
was
blaming me. ‘He was the cutest dog in the world.' She dabbed her eyes. ‘Do you think there's an alternative universe somewhere, where he's alive?'

‘I'm sure there is.' I held her hand.

I didn't tell her that thirteen years ago the same thing had happened to a cute little girl I was looking after. Was it my fault? I had tormented myself with this question ever since. Sometimes, even now, I would catch a glimpse of a girl or a young woman that took me off guard and spun me over into an alternative life, the life that might have been mine if Meredith had still been alive, if Stephanie and I had still been together.

Stephanie had never forgiven me, and I had never forgiven
myself. Our relationship eventually collapsed under the weight of her accusations: ‘You were
supposed
to be responsible, Bertie. How could you have let go of her hand? You're a typical mummy's boy, irresponsible, careless, self-obsessed!'

Was I? Or was I, in fact, as Stacey suggested kindly through a sniffle, just terminally unlucky?

However, this particular cloud had a silver lining. Monty's demise opened up the way for Stacey to move into my flat. I even let her bring the teddies, which she arranged on Mother's dressing table beside the bottle of L'Heure Bleue left by Mother and finished off by Inna. It felt strange and sinful at first to make love in Mother's bed, so full of ghosts, but after a while even that became wonderfully ordinary.

Stacey took over the chair of the Tenants Association vacated by Mrs Cracey, and helped to mount a lively campaign against the proposed fourteen-storey building in the garden, insisting, as Lubetkin would have done, that it should fit harmoniously with its environment and should provide affordable homes for low-income families. When Len's ground-floor flat became available, she helped me arrange for Margaret and Jenny to get the tenancy, aided by the fact that Margaret was now in a wheelchair. So as one chapter closed, a new chapter opened in the life of Lubetkin's Mad Yurt.

From time to time the old mood would come over me, and I would launch into a morose soliloquy on canine and human mortality, the wanton destruction of urban trees, the housing crisis, the unravelling of the post-war consensus, George Clooney's love life and other evils and inequities of our time.

Stacey would watch me with a small smile. ‘I'm sure you're right, Bertie,' she would say.