The Memory of Love (20 page)

‘I did. I think I woke up your landlady.’

I followed her inside, sensitive to the smell in the room, of sweat and stale breath, the residual odour of vomit. Two steps into the room she turned to me, her voice as hollow as dead wood. What she said next swept my mind clear of thoughts.

‘Julius has been arrested.’

On the drive to the house Saffia told me what had happened. Two men had arrived at the house in the wake of the party, just after the last of the guests had departed. Plain clothes, it seemed, for neither wore uniforms. Julius and Saffia had not yet gone to bed. No reason had been given for the arrest, no warrant, no explanation. Julius protested, of course, but in the end had seen no other choice but to comply. Saffia had tried to telephone Ade and Kekura, but failing to reach either she had come to me. I’d flattered myself, thinking I was the first place she had turned. I watched her while she tried the telephone again, listening to the faint, maddening ringing. Nobody answered. She stood with her hands covering her face, shaking her head.

‘I’m sure it’s a mistake,’ I said. ‘What else could it be?’

I suppose I had imagined we would simply wait it out. God knows I had no experience of these things, but I was – I am – by nature inclined to caution. There seemed no point in getting worked up by what could yet turn out to be a false alarm. We might even be sitting down together in a few hours laughing about it. I genuinely believed it. What I wanted to do was to stay with Saffia, here in this house. I could offer her comfort, I could offer her strength. I could be her protector. We would wait it out, and when it was over – well, I didn’t think that far ahead, only of the possibility of the hours between.

Saffia picked up her car keys and proposed we drive to Ade and Kekura’s homes.

No sign of Ade. A neighbour told us he had been taken away in the early morning. Ade had been one of the last to leave the party; they’d been waiting for him when he arrived home. From Ade’s place we hastened to Kekura. There we found neither Kekura, nor news of him. There were three police stations within reasonable proximity of Saffia and Julius’s house and we visited each in turn. The officer in charge at the first station tried to reassure Saffia that missing husbands had a habit of turning up. Saffia described the men who had come to the house that morning. He’d looked at her then, a narrow, curious stare, shrugged his shoulders and turned his back to us. I took Saffia by the arm and pulled her away.

We drove through silent streets. Back at the house Saffia continued to make calls. We discovered nothing new. Nothing on the radio either, just the usual round-up of births, deaths and marriages. All news was of the successful moon landing.

Saffia told me her aunt was away. I went into the kitchen and found some food left over from the night before. There was a new throbbing in my temple and I drank several glasses of water. I carried some cold
olele
and plantain back into the sitting room.

There was still then, at least in me, the certainty that this was not as serious as it appeared, that Julius would yet stride through the door any minute and turn the whole thing into a huge laugh, a story to tell against himself. I even, astonishingly, entertained quite seriously for several minutes the notion of kidnap, and then the idea that this was a practical joke on the part of Kekura and Ade. No doubt it was the bizarre nature of the previous evening: the moon landing, my own fall from grace, the residual alcohol in my bloodstream; anything had begun to seem possible.

One o’clock. Julius was not back. Two o’clock. Julius was not back. Four-thirty. Julius was not back. Five o’clock. Six-forty-five. Eight o’clock.

The hours dragged by, at other times sped bumpily past. At the sound of the telephone bell Saffia jumped up and snatched the receiver only to slump in disappointment when it was not Julius. Darkness came, encroaching upon hope. Somewhere a child was being beaten, the cries seemed to go on for minutes. Between Saffia and me, silence. Then Saffia rose and as she did so uttered a long sigh, of which she seemed entirely unaware. When it was over her physicality was altered; her shoulders sagged as though she was literally deflated. She moved around the room turning on the lights.

I said, ‘Is there anything at all Julius might have been arrested for?’

‘Of course not.’

We rehearsed the events of the morning, the possibilities – of which there were few. At the end of it she repeated what she had said at the start. None of it made any sense.

I poured us drinks. Saffia protested she didn’t want anything. I persuaded her it would help. She had not touched food all day. After a single sip she set the glass back upon the table. As for me, the action of the alcohol, the hair of the dog, had an immediate and soothing effect upon my nervous system.

‘We don’t even know where he is,’ she said. ‘I should have followed them. I didn’t think. It was all so confusing.’

‘How could you have known?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t have known. You don’t know until it happens. And something like this has never happened before.’

At eleven I went home promising to be back in the morning. An offer to stay had been declined. My route home took me through several checkpoints. Like so many others I’d ceased to see them other than a momentary inconvenience, that is unless your luck went against you, or you handled an exchange badly. Bullish behaviour provoked the soldiers. I wondered if something of the sort had unfolded between Julius and the men who came to the house that morning, that what began as some sort of mistake had escalated into something more for no good reason.

I nodded at the soldier manning the roadblock. He loosed the rope in his hand and eased the barrier upwards.

CHAPTER 20

Some names he knows.

Lamin says he worked colouring Easter eggs in a factory in Germany. He uses the occasional German word:
Frau. Haus. Osterei
. Diagnosed with dissocial personality disorder. Attila does not believe Lamin has ever been to Germany, Ileana tells Adrian. Lamin is making progress, Attila has allowed him to be unshackled from his bed, the chains remain around his ankles and wrists. Lamin shambles around in the sunlight, the mass of his chains gathered up and looped over one arm, like a bride’s train. He raises his free hand in salute to Adrian.

In the bed next to Lamin is Kapuwa. Adrian has read his notes. Paid a bowl of rice in exchange for twelve hours a day in a diamond pit. In the evenings the men curbed their hunger with ganja. The mines were overrun by rebel soldiers, who worked them just as hard, for less food. Kapuwa escaped, but left his mind behind. His family brought a healer to wash him and recite prayers once a week. His violent outbursts frightened his family, who kept him chained to a bamboo pole in the yard.

Borbor occupies the bed in the centre of the ward. Borbor is mentally retarded and epileptic. He turns his back to Adrian and bends over waving his backside, which Adrian can see plainly through the rent in Borbor’s trousers. Adrian pretends to be horrified, Borbor laughs and claps. The other patients complain Borbor is crazy. Adrian suspects Borbor is less demented than he would have others believe.

And then there is the Professor. One in every asylum, thinks Adrian. The mentally retarded and the brilliant, together in madness. The Professor is a manic-depressive, the walls around whose bed are covered in chalked words: poetic, nonsensical, obscene. The father of one of the new patients, a religious man, has complained. The Professor does not wear chains, and has the freedom of the grounds. Adrian recognises him as the man he spoke to at the front gate that first morning.

These four are long-term residents. Then there are the others, who come and go. They lie in bed all day, sleeping or in various stages of withdrawal. At night the sound of their deliriums upsets the other patients. Occasionally there is a ruckus. Many of them were once fighters, who faced each other as enemies. Now they lie side by side. The young man Adrian brought is one of them. They come and go. Come and go.

Today Lisa had called in the early morning to remind him of Kate’s eleven-plus exam. Adrian hung up and called back after ten minutes to speak to Kate. If his daughter was at all nervous, it had not shown. ‘It’s very sweet of you to call, Daddy.’ A careful, conservative child, six pounds at birth, petite and china fragile. Lisa had stayed home to look after her for the first year, and then a second, then a third, after which all talk of returning to work had ceased. Sometimes, it seemed to Adrian, he had difficulty telling where his wife ended and his daughter began, as if birth had failed to separate them. Secretly he wished Lisa would go back to work. Meanwhile Kate had grown into a child measured in thought and deed, whose transition to adulthood looked seamless, with none of the messy mistakes other children suffered.

On the telephone Adrian wished Kate luck. He was just about to tell her about the sunbird, when she interrupted him. ‘I’d better go now. So I shan’t be late.’ At times her poise unsettled him, as though she found his efforts wanting. It had not always been so. When Kate was two she’d been prone to nightmares and would insist he – not Lisa – sit by her bed until she went back to sleep. Later he would watch her sleep, wondering what such a tiny creature could possibly be dreaming about.

On the way through town he’d bought several packets of biscuits from a roadside seller. He gives them now to Kapuwa, who takes them to a table in the middle of the room, allotting them carefully among the residents of the ward. Those who can step forward do so quietly to receive their share. Kapuwa carries biscuits over to the chained men. Lamin shambles in. The whole affair is conducted with solemnity and in silence. Kapuwa moving along the line of bunks, the men raising both chained hands to receive the biscuit, followed by a nod or grunt of thanks. Adrian wonders what it reminds him of, then realises. Kapuwa looks like a priest giving communion.

And afterwards, passing through the ward, he no longer notices the smell. The sound of his footsteps reassuringly solid. Adrian feels happier than he has in many weeks, months. Years.

Today she is dressed in a patterned blue
lappa
and a T-shirt bearing a picture of a dolphin. The T-shirt is too big for her and slips from one shoulder, a slender bone to which flesh and skin cling. Her feet are bare. Forty-three. Two years older than Adrian, the same age as Lisa. Adrian thinks of the fine lines on Lisa’s skin. Agnes’s face is unblemished, she weighs no more than a girl. She could be twenty or she could be sixty. The years are carried not upon her body, but in the light of her eyes.

Today, too, another development. Salia, who must have been waiting for him to arrive, intercepted him within yards of the gate and handed him a gold chain.

She sits facing him, her forearms on the armrests of the chair. This time she looks less often at Salia. She is calm, her voice contains little inflection or emotion. Adrian has less trouble understanding. Time spent helping Ileana with her rounds in the hospital has familiarised him to accents and patterns of the language.

Agnes. She was born and married, she tells him, in a town to the north of the city; her husband worked at the government agricultural project raising different varieties of fruit and vegetables. Dwarf bananas, whose yield equalled and even surpassed the ordinary ones. Pawpaws, larger than the local variety. Guavas, limes, tomatoes and vegetables. He kept a few seeds back for her and she grew them on her own plot at the back of the house and traded them in the market. In time she began to carry them to the city once a week to sell outside the supermarkets to white women. She bore five children, of whom two returned. Both were boys. The girls all survived. Naasu. Yalie. Marian.

Naasu, the eldest, was a helpful child and clever. When she passed her school certificate they gave her a party with sweets and drinks of coloured water. As soon as she finished with school Naasu got a job at the department store in the city. By then, a bag of rice had become so much more expensive. And some months too, Agnes’s husband’s salary at the government nurseries went unpaid.

Sometimes Agnes visited Naasu at the store on days when she went into town to sell her produce. Naasu would leave the counter where she sold cosmetics and take her to the places she and the other girls had lunch, one place in particular called the Red Rooster. Agnes enjoyed herself although it seemed wrong to spend money on food cooked by somebody else. They ate the food out of paper boxes. Afterwards Agnes would collect up the boxes and take them home, though Naasu laughed and tried to persuade her to leave them. Other times Naasu brought home tiny bottles of perfume she said were for giving out to the customers. Agnes saved them to wear on special occasions. Ah, Naasu looked so fine in the clothes she wore to work, though Alfred didn’t like the way she painted her face. Naasu explained she must wear the cosmetics herself, so that the customers could see how they looked. However, in deference to her father, she left home with her face bare. She had to pay for the cosmetics out of her own money; for some reason this knowledge appeased Alfred.

Agnes had never been inside the shop during opening hours, but there were times Naasu let her in through the back after the store was closed. She walked through the empty halls gazing at the displays, the imported fabrics, the shoes with long, narrow heels, the pale dummies with pink pouting mouths. She touched them all, except the dummies, which for some reason frightened her. Naasu laughed and showed her the storeroom, where the disembodied arms and legs were stacked in piles.

Another time a bird flew in. It swooped through the wide doorways from hall to hall and perched on the shoulder of a mannequin.

Naasu no longer works at the store, Agnes tells him. She herself has not been back to the store for many years.

She is not dissembling, this Adrian can see. In turn he doesn’t contradict her, but says, ‘Tell me about the first trip you made, the first one you remember making that you didn’t plan to make.’

It was maybe a year ago. Harmattan time again. It began in the same way as every one since, with dreams so real she could not escape them. She woke in the morning with the soles of her feet dirty; she must have gone out of the house to use the toilet and forgotten her slippers, though she had no memory of doing so. The dreams brought on a headache and she remembered waking in the morning with a blurred patch in the centre of her vision. Then suddenly everything turned black, leaving only a circle of light. She sent the girl out to buy medicine because Naasu wasn’t at home, she had travelled to the wedding of a classmate in another town, she had been gone for two days and was not due for two more.

All that morning Agnes had a strong sense something was about to happen. She went to the door to see if the girl was on her way back from the pharmacy. But even after the child had returned, Agnes found herself rising to go and check at the door over and over. She forced herself to sit down. Anxiety beat in her breast like a bird’s wings, like the bird trapped in the department store. Still she couldn’t stay in the chair for long. She called the child to come and they set about preparing the evening meal. The pressure in Agnes’s skull was joined by a sound like the rushing of air. Her own voice as she gave instructions to the child sounded like somebody else calling from another room. She wished Naasu was home. She tried to block out the sounds and concentrate on what she was doing, but all the time she felt as if she were dreaming, as if standing there cooking with the child, watching her hands slicing meat, was all part of the dream.

She does not remember leaving the house. Later, the child described what happened. Agnes had sent her on an errand in the afternoon, into town to buy fruit for Naasu’s return. The child did as she was bid. She was standing at the market when she saw Agnes hurrying in the direction of the main road. The girl thought maybe Naasu was coming back early and Agnes was going to meet the bus.

Naasu found Agnes five days later. She followed her mother’s footsteps, asking people in every village. In one town, somebody – a niece by marriage – had recognised Agnes, and spoken to her, but Agnes seemed not to remember her. She pointed Naasu in the direction Agnes had taken.

Agnes remembers fragments from those days. But she cannot tell Adrian whether those things truly occurred or were part of her dreams. She remembers taking a foot road, seeing the dust form a whirlwind ahead of her, spinning away. One night she slept in a farm worker’s hut. Another day she watched the clouds moving across the sky, and noticed they were both heading in the same direction, but when Naasu asked her where she had been going she could not say. She was forty miles from the place they both lived. After Naasu brought her home Agnes slept for two whole days.

Agnes reaches the end of her account. She sits facing Adrian, who in turn regards her in silence. He is right, he knows he is right. Everything she has told him today supports his notion. He would not dare to make a diagnosis at this early stage. But nonetheless he is sure of himself in a way he has rarely had occasion to be before.

From under a sheet of paper Adrian draws the gold chain Salia had given him and hands it to Agnes.

‘Thank you,’ she says courteously.

‘It is yours, then?’

‘Yes. This is the one I lost in the ward. I thought maybe it had been stolen.’

Adrian inclines his head. He is aware of Salia watching. Adrian doesn’t tell Agnes what Salia has told him. That the chain had been brought by the man from the old department store, who’d redeemed it from a pawnbroker, one of the many who sat with weighing scales and jeweller’s loupes in the street outside the store.

Agnes herself had pawned it.

Sunday lunchtime. Adrian has managed to borrow a vehicle to go to Ileana’s for lunch. It is the first time he has been behind the wheel of a car in weeks and he sets off, uncertainly at first. The Land Cruiser is much larger than anything he has handled, as well as being left-hand drive. It takes his hands and feet time to recover the memory of driving. Soon he is moving at speed, savouring the mood of independence. He drives in the opposite direction to the instructions Ileana has given him, towards the city, through the dense throng at the roundabout. The heat is rising, he is grateful for the air conditioning, both for the cool and the insulating effect from the dust and noise on the other side of the glass. He turns the wheel of the vehicle to the left and the traffic eases up. On the right is an open stretch of ground, a golf course; directly ahead he can see the sea. The road swings around to the right and Adrian follows it, driving the full length of the beach. Here there is no traffic at all. He turns off the air conditioning and winds down the window, lets the breeze touch his face. At the far end he doubles back at another roundabout. When he reaches the left turn at the end he sees a small road he had missed when he had come from the other direction. Behind a pair of concrete pillars a crescent driveway curves under the arch of a building. Adrian turns in and drives to the car park at the back, descends and makes his way across the uneven tarmac to the building. Three steps lead up to a fountain, an art deco figure of a girl, head tilted back, outstretched arms holding aloft a torch. A trickle of water from the torch runs down the girl’s arms and belly into a small pool of green at her feet, from which a scab-eared dog laps. Behind her, a sign painted upon the wall, in faded letters:
Ocean Club Patrons Only
.