The Memory of Love (16 page)

CHAPTER 17

Julius entered my office carrying a briefcase of whisky. His shirt was linen, short-sleeved with stitching upon the lapels, highly starched and only slightly wrinkled in the heat. Next to him I felt dull and rumpled. I was wearing a suit, one of the two I possessed, given to me by my father and shiny at the trouser seat and elbows. The other I should have collected from the cleaner’s on my way in, but had been diverted by a fracas involving a hustler, one of those men who approach you on the street, their illicit wares hidden inside their coats. This fellow had newspapers. They were no more than gossip sheets really, though they were theoretically banned. Their stock-in-trade comprised half-baked conspiracy theories, political scandals, murders served up with especially gruesome or bizarre details and often a graphic photograph, obtained from a police source for the price of a bribe. Once or twice I had found a copy of one of those papers in my office after Julius had been there. I might cast an eye over the front page before I tossed it into the bin.

I barely registered the vendor as he passed me. I noticed he tried to catch my eye. I shifted my gaze and he moved on. Moments later he was seized by three men who seemed to come out of nowhere. The vendor tried to make his escape, but today wasn’t his day. The place was full of plain-clothes police. A sweep of the whole street at rush hour when the vendors were busiest. They gave him a thrashing and tossed him in the back of a Land Rover.

That and the rain held the traffic up for hours. I passed the time in a barber’s shop. Some weeks before I had been persuaded by the owner to try a moustache. I sat back in the chair while he soaped my face and scraped at the stray hairs, shaping the line of hairs on my upper lip into a neat bar, divided by a parting. I faced myself in the mirror. I was pleased with the result.

And now here was Julius, stockpiling booty in my office, crates of soft drinks and mixers, bottles of spirits. He was planning a party for the moon landing, which threatened to overwhelm the event itself.

‘Hey, Cole!’

I was hot, damp and vaguely irritated to see him. He leaned over the desk, and I caught, mixed in with his own smell, a scent of Saffia.

It almost winded me.

I know how we looked. People couldn’t understand what he saw in me, I’m sure. For I had the same thought. I was, am, a careful man. Julius’s presumptuousness was breathtaking. He had no fear of life. It was there in his fluid attitude to the ownership of possessions, in the way he spent whatever money he had in his pocket. He possessed the ability to drink himself to incoherence and back to lucidity. He would go on, carrying you with him, until all the tiredness had gone. And when, with the new light stretched across the horizon, he would drive the two of us home though he was in no fit state to do so. He would bang the bonnet of the car. ‘No fear, Cole,’ he’d shout, ‘she knows the way home by now.’ Of religion he had no need. He believed in himself. A confidence that extended even to his singing, so that years later when he was remembered, it was as a musical man. Yet the only quality you could say his voice possessed was force. Yes, Julius believed in himself. He didn’t fear death – for death was too insignificant, too small, it resided below the level of his contempt. He had survived a serious childhood illness that killed many others. He drew power from the fact of it, as though it proved he was blessed.

He believed in his own destiny and he made others believe it too. He was a seducer. Of woman, man, child or dog. To him I was company, someone to be won over, simple as that. Plus, he was easily bored.

‘Give me five, Cole!’ Our palms slapped together and slid across each other, our thumbs and forefingers clicked. He hefted a buttock up on to the edge of my desk.

‘What’s up, my friend?’

‘Nothing.’

He bent over for a closer look at me, put out his hand and lifted my chin, his face a mere six inches away. I could feel his warm breath. He gave a low whistle.

‘Suits you, Cole.’

‘Thank you.’ I decided to respond as though he was serious.

He sat back and regarded me thoughtfully a moment. ‘What have you done with Vanessa? That was one fine-looking lady. You need a woman, Cole.’ For some reason he kept using my surname, an occasional habit of his.

I shrugged. ‘I’m fine.’

‘I’m serious, Cole. I may be a married man but I still know a few of the ladies.’ He winked at me.

I didn’t want to enquire too closely what he meant by that. I felt vaguely unwell.

‘I shall make sure I invite somebody to the party for you. Some fine woman.’

‘Not on my account, please.’

Julius laughed at that. ‘You know, among the Mende, Cole, there is a practice that when a stranger arrives in a village he is given a woman to keep him company at night, often a daughter of the chief himself. The Europeans made much of this custom, to them it proved what people of low morals we all were. But you know why the Mende had this custom, Cole?’

I shook my head.

‘Because they know full well a man needs a woman. It is in the nature of things. A single man is trouble, a hungry jackal. So the village provides a chicken. To me, Cole, this is surely the more civilised approach. And besides, by providing a chicken of their own choosing, now they had a spy in the jackal’s lair! And the European traders thought they were being generous. They kept on coming back. Beware chickens bearing gifts, my friend.’ His laughter rolled like applause around the room.

I swallowed and pasted the facsimile of a smile upon my face.

‘You need a woman, my friend, to cheer you up. Whose
tumbu
you can tickle with that new moustache of yours.’

Julius’s worry beads, the way I thought of them then. He often carried, in his pockets, some piece of metal, an engine part or piece of some structure, something used to demonstrate a principle to his students or perhaps just something picked up and pocketed in the course of the day. That afternoon it was a nut and bolt he spun on the surface of my desk. I watched his hands, spinning the bolt round and round. Fingers. Knuckles. Fingertips. Nails. The smooth brown surface of the desk. Smooth like skin. Julius’s fingers playing, grazing, stroking, touching. Saffia.

Exams over, the students headed home for the summer break, although, of course, in our country it was the height of the rains. We had, since Independence, stuck with the British scholastic timetable. I had nowhere to go, no family to visit, and I lacked the funds to travel. Banville Jones had secured for himself a fellowship overseas, recommended by the Dean. I wondered how he had managed it. A vacancy had arisen within the department with the departure of another colleague. Some months earlier I would have assumed it was mine for the asking, but now I was less confident. I decided to devote the holidays to completing at least two more papers, and to this end I spent hours each week going through the archives in the university library. I planned to keep myself busy.

Still, I faced the thought of the long break with apprehension. I relied on my regular contact with Julius to see Saffia. Julius was a spontaneous sort of fellow, incapable of planning ahead by more than a few minutes. He would doubtless eschew the mundane rituals involved in keeping in touch. And there were only so many times I could contrive encounters with Saffia, especially in the light of recent, dismaying events.

Meanwhile the day of the moon landing approached. That at least afforded me an evening in Saffia’s company. Julius was as excited as a small child on his birthday. My office had become a drinks store. Kekura was charged with setting up the equipment for the broadcast. I had promised to secure extra chairs, to which end I had placed a request with the Dean to borrow some from the lecture theatre.

In the streets, the fever spread. Women clothed themselves in commemorative batiks and threaded their hair into concoctions contrived to produce the illusion of upward velocity, named their male offspring Apollo. The chief Imam included a denunciation of the mission in his call to prayers. Our own pastor called the enterprise godless, warned against the perils of man’s egotism and pointed, if proof were needed, to the fact of the craft’s pagan name. Julius thought the whole thing hilarious and begged me to invite my pastor to the house for the party. He would invite the Imam, for the pleasure, he said, of hearing them agree on something.

That afternoon in town I collected my suit from the cleaner’s and, on the spur of the moment, I entered a tailor’s shop. At some level I think I felt emboldened by my new moustache, though I would never describe myself as a vain man. I had not the physique to encourage vanity. Still, that day I decided I’d had enough of the starched white shirts I was in the habit of ordering three at a time. The tailor took my measurements and showed me a number of different styles, flicking through the pages of the catalogue. I pointed one out, he smiled and complimented me on my choice. Discussion of the price, as ever, turned out to be a somewhat lengthier business. We reached a compromise on the understanding the shirts would be ready for collection within forty-eight hours, in time for the party.

Organising the delivery of the chairs proved considerably more problematic. I had arranged transport through a contact of Banville Jones, a Syrian, who owned a haulage company. The company turned out to consist of a single open-back lorry. I left the man a deposit and made a booking for the morning of the party, overlooking the fact the event was to take place on a Sunday. The university buildings would be closed. I switched the booking to the Friday, but the lorry, I was informed, would be going upcountry earlier in the week. It was due back on Friday. I could have use of it as soon as it arrived.

‘How do I know your driver will be back in time?’

The owner looked at me. ‘He’ll be there,’ and smiled. ‘Inshalla.’

As luck had it the man was true to his word. I was sitting in my office when the lorry arrived; the driver parked up on the other side of the faculty building. For a few cents I had secured the labour of two of the night watchmen and we set about loading stacks of chairs. The driver sat picking his teeth with a matchstick and watching us from his cabin, his labour apparently not being part of the agreement. It was slow going. By chance two of my students passed by. One was a Ghanaian fellow, another from the provinces. They were staying on campus for the duration of the break. I called to them and within half an hour we were done. I realised I’d given no consideration to how the chairs were to be unloaded. I could scarcely remove the watchmen from their posts. Fortunately the two students offered their services and hopped into the back, while I climbed into the cab to direct the driver.

As we drove through the streets, a warm wind entered the cab. Darkness was falling over the houses. We passed through the streets of the city and began to climb up the winding road into the hills, the engine straining under the load. The two students sitting on the tailgate raised their voices against the wind. At a traffic light one of them leaned over and purchased several sticks of roast meat from a street seller and for the rest of the journey they sat sharing the meat between them and tossing the sticks over the side.

The house was in darkness. I had told Julius when I was coming. Feeling exasperated I instructed the driver and the two students to wait while I went to knock on the door.

My first knock went unanswered, as did my second. I tried one more time. Behind me I was aware of the driver sitting, worrying at the spaces between his teeth with a matchstick. He turned off the engine and dimmed the headlights. I heard him suck his teeth with impatience. The students had lapsed into silence, watching me idly.

‘Come on! Where are your people?’ called the driver.

It wasn’t something I would ordinarily do, but the weight of the man’s insistence was at my back. I reached out and turned the doorknob. The door was open. So somebody was home. Saffia’s aunt? Quite possibly she was at the back of the house and hadn’t heard the door. I moved hesitantly forward. There was no light, except that of the dying day. Too early still for a moon. I moved like a blind man. I didn’t want to give the aunt a stroke by coming up at her out of the darkness. I searched for a lamp or light switch. Another step and another, I moved forward into the house. From somewhere I thought I heard a sound, though the timing coincided so exactly with my own tread I felt unsure. I waited and listened until it came again.

Louder this time. A moan. I stood, covered by the darkness, and listened as it came, over and over. My heart began to beat, the blood rushed to my head. I felt I must leave, but I could not move. My body was rigid.

The sound of footsteps behind me. The truck driver, come to find out what was going on. As he moved towards me, I saw his face split into an obscene grin; his teeth glinted in the half-light and he uttered a filthy laugh. I turned and pushed him towards the door. He went, but with reluctance, chuckling as he allowed himself to be propelled outside. I closed the door behind us. The driver passed a remark to the students accompanied by a filthy gesture.

‘Shut your mouth!’ I would have hit him, I could scarcely hold on to my rage. He was quiet, but the insolent smile stayed on his face.

We unloaded the chairs and piled them up outside the door. When I felt sufficient time had passed, I told the driver to sound the horn. At the same time I rapped smartly on the door. The combined noise would have woken the dead. Sure enough, Julius appeared, barefoot, his shirt unbuttoned. Suddenly I found I could hardly look him in the eye. He disappeared to fetch a pair of shoes and helped us move the chairs into the house, where we stacked them on the verandah.