Hand Me Down World (31 page)

I asked myself what difference did vases and paintings make to a blind man who couldn't see them? The blind gentleman could remember what his apartment looked like just as he could remember what his wife looked like. They didn't have to be there.

I went to the shop three times with all the things Defoe wrote to the inspector about. Defoe was now my problem.

According to Ramona addicts behave in the same way that I did. They do not think of the consequences. The world is reduced to what lies closest to hand.

So I had hotel sex with Defoe in order to buy his silence. I also needed the money. I couldn't afford to lose my room or the little money I shaved off the housekeeping. I went down to his room and everything he describes is true. Even the bit about my hunger. The little Frenchman would not make love to me. He was afraid I would lose my mystery. I would turn into familiar hollows and plains. Whenever Bernard tried to prevent me seeing something about him he'd build a cloud of confusion out of words. He could build a wall out of the same. He knew I didn't know the questions to ask that would allow me to see over that wall. So we were left to lie with that wall between us. Me wanting to climb over it. The little Frenchman on the other side nursing his insecurities.

So I had Defoe. I don't like his eel story. And I still remember a visit to the zoo where he couldn't tear himself away from the Cape hunting dogs eating the live chickens. So many in the world are like Defoe. They lean on the safety rail and watch with horror the pain of others. Funny. I don't recall him so clearly as the blind gentleman. The blind gentleman had loose skin hanging off the end of his penis. I was always glad when he slipped on a condom. But I have him to thank for teaching me how to build a picture of the boy. I am sorry it took a lie to learn that skill.

Ramona always says she wouldn't have done what I did. I ask her what she thinks a flower does when it sees the sun. It opens itself up. Isn't that the most natural thing in the world? Her face got that patchy look. I had put her husband back in her thoughts. She is seeing all over again a line of women opening up as her husband comes into their lives. I try not to let her stick around in that thought. I talk about the boy. He is the distant shore I am trying to reach. Defoe is just a buoy to hang onto, to catch my breath, before setting off for the shore again—and again. Now when I look at Ramona she is sitting up on the edge of her bunk. She is nodding. The line of women has gone.

thirty-five

I have nearly finished writing my account. I have read out parts to Ramona. She has tried hard to correct my mind but not the events I have written about.

She wonders if the inspector is soft on me. Why else would he show up as regularly as he does? I tell her I don't see neediness in the inspector. The inspector is a family man. I have met his two daughters—they stared at me until their father whispered in their ears. By the end of that visit they were playing on the floor around our feet. I have not met his wife, Francesca. But I have eaten the bread rolls she gives the inspector to pass on to me.

This afternoon the inspector arrived in a white shirt and tie and black shoes that shone like a waiter's. He'd been to the commemorative service for Ines Maria Dellabarca.

He leant across the table that divides us. I sat forward to listen. And later this is what I told Ramona.

The church sits on a knoll above a shallow bay carved out from a steep hillside of white stone. It does not confront the ocean panorama. It sits at an angle, its attention divided between the sea and the white mountainsides marching inland. In the morning the sun finds the graves of the children of shepherds. By late afternoon the headstones of the sons of fishermen are luminous.

It was a bright day. The last of the summer flowers drooped around the graves. The sea breeze failed to reach the church, said the inspector, but the hillsides trembled with tiny bulbs of colour.

The church was full. The inspector walked to the front to pay his respects to the family. I did not know Ines Maria Dellabarca had a fiancé. She never mentioned him. But it makes sense now. That must have been Claudio on the other end of the phone I picked up out of the dirt. A thin asthmatic fellow, says the inspector, whose shoulders shook with every cough. Her parents sat in front with an older sister, Christina. The inspector looked around at faces of old schoolfriends, work colleagues and neighbours.

The grandfather climbed up the front on crooked legs. When one leg gave way the congregation leant forward ready to catch him. The grandfather raised a hand and smiled. The inspector says he is an old rogue. He may even have stumbled on purpose. Anyway he stood up there nodding and smiling at various faces. Then he settled his gaze out the open doors and began to recount the morning Ines Maria Dellabarca came into the world. He'd never known such happiness. When he left the hospital he stopped by the well above the beach and made a wish, then he carried on up the hill to this very same church, and here he walked around the family graves to break the news of a granddaughter's arrival into the world.

Other people followed the grandfather up to the pulpit. When Claudio spoke each word had to be drawn out of him. In the end the old fisherman led Claudio back to his pew.

When everyone had had their say the inspector rose from his place near the back and walked down the aisle. He spoke with the parents and the grandfather, and with their agreement he climbed up the front to read my letter.

From the church the inspector drove to the beach. There, he said, he sat on the hull of a boat. He smoked a bit and looked out to sea. The horizon was dirty with sand blown off the North African desert. There are days, he says, when nothing on the beach looks ever to have been disturbed. The sand is exactly as it has been for a thousand years with white shells sticking up like ancient ruins. Then along comes a storm and everything that had a look of permanence about it is ransacked.

A year ago, he said, this is where he had found himself, and with the impossible task of trying to piece everything back together again.

This afternoon he asked me if I still think about Ines Maria Dellabarca.

‘Yes,' I told him. Although I don't know if she appears as a thought. I remember seeing one of the blind gentleman's beetles trapped in amber. That is how she appears—her face filled with fright, a hand thrown back, and sometimes there is another picture of her and this one I shut my eyes to. I am trying hard to rid myself of that picture and instead insert another, of her looking at me after we climbed out from under the dinghy on the beach.

The inspector listened closely, then he nodded and continued where he had left off.

While he sat on the hull smoking, his thoughts turned to a friend from childhood. He still has a photo of him, a small boy, dressed in a rodeo suit that was sent to him by relatives in America, twirling rope. The boy grew up to become a fisherman. He and the inspector stayed the best of friends. One evening the fisherman was feeding pots over the side of the boat when a rope wrapped around his leg and pulled him overboard, down into the filmy depths, where for days after, months, the inspector continued to see him flopping about like bait, his bright red cowboy shirt shifting in the cold currents, his face all butter and light, gape-eyed, as though struck with wonder and at the same time stalled by thought. He continued to see him like that, he couldn't rid himself of the image of the drowned man, his friend from childhood in the cowboy suit, until one day his memory let go of him, and he rose slowly, like a man in an armchair, rotating up to the white light.

The inspector said, when the time came, when the moment was right to do so, I would have to find a way of letting go.

‘Not of the boy,' I said.

The inspector smiled, his eyes moistened in that way I have described to Ramona and which makes her so suspicious.

Those moist eyes were not trying to unlock me. They were setting me up for good news.

Next month, he said, he would be visiting Berlin. A stamp fair, he said. But he planned to see Abebi. He hoped to return with some news. Perhaps more. He didn't want to make promises. I would have to wait and see.

I placed a hand over my heart and I thanked the inspector. Then I asked him the question Ramona always asks. I asked why he visits, why does he go out of his way on my behalf.

He sat back, shifted his head. He looked up at the clock on the wall. I looked too. There wasn't much time left. Fifteen minutes. He got out his cigarettes and laid them on the table.

In the brief time left to us he began to describe a trip he'd taken to Serene. Serene, he reminded me, is near to where I had washed up. It was after my trial. For months on end he'd felt as if he'd walked in my shoes. Sometimes he said he'd felt inhabited by me. He'd spent weeks away from home following my footsteps between Sicily and Berlin. Now he needed a break, so he took his family to Serene.

One hot afternoon he found himself swimming far out from the other swimmers. He swam, he said, with a reckless disregard for his capabilities. Later his wife would tell him he looked like a man swimming towards Africa. As he swam he noted how still the ocean is compared to the shallows. When he stuck his head under and opened his eyes he saw how quickly the blue light turned to coal-black depths. This would have been the place to turn around, but he didn't. He swam on. Several times it occurred to him that he had gone out far enough. But he kept swimming. By now the beach had disappeared from view. The tops of the old buildings that line the beach bobbed up and down. Out there in the sea, far from the shore, removed, he said, from everything he had ever known, he found himself thinking about me. Thinking—this is how it must have been. And, he said, how extraordinary to arrive in this way, without the frozen smiles of cabin crew, to arrive instead wet, numb and fearful.

On his way back to shore his arms felt heavy. His strokes were more laboured. He found himself out of breath. The possibility of his own death mildly entered his thoughts. He found himself thinking about his daughters. Out there in the sea, the inspector said, he began to cry. He forced himself on. Soon the buildings above the beach grew taller. At last the shoreline with its circus effect of air-filled animals and sun umbrellas came into view. He said he was scared more than anything. Scared of never seeing his girls again rather than scared of dying.

The inspector stopped there. His moist eyes smiled back at me. I reached across to touch his moustache. But he drew back. He blinked once or twice at me. His fingers moved to his tie knot. He glanced up at the clock. His hand raked in his cigarettes. He coughed into the back of his hand and stood.

He said, ‘I don't know if that was a satisfactory explanation but it will have to do.'

part five
:
Abebi

thirty-six

Jermayne is gone. That's the first thing to know. I don't wish to pretend any longer. I told him to go last year. It was September. He took everything with him. Outside in the street the leaves were falling off the trees. The same wind shook up the apartment. Everything flew out the window with Jermayne.

He was never a doting father. He took on his parenting role as a job. The other thing to know about Jermayne is his obsession with money. He is a dreamer. An ordinary life was never enough. We had to have the best. Now, to have the best, as I learned through my twelve years with Jermayne, requires time and patience and planning. None of those qualities can be said to be Jermayne's. Consequently, we who were destined to have everything, according to my husband, ended up with nothing.

Never did I think he would use Daniel in the way that he did, as a bargaining chip, like a TV you go out and hire.

There is another thing to know about Jermayne. The woman does his washing. That is the unfortunate and arrogant part of my husband. The careless part of him left behind wads of money in his pockets. Money that could never be properly explained. So, I asked myself, what has changed? What is new in Jermayne's behaviour? The question led me to follow him and Daniel to the park. I could not believe that Jermayne had overnight turned himself into a normal loving father. That's where I saw her. In the park. The boy and the ‘incubator' woman. I saw the exchange of money. I saw Jermayne walk away. And I saw Daniel leave with that woman. I did not want to believe what I saw, so again I followed, and a third time. There may have been a fourth. It was always the same thing. The woman waiting under the trees. Daniel running to see her. I don't need to say what that did to me.

I always read to the child. I still do. Every night I read to him. His eyelids were beginning to close when I put the book down. I asked him about his play in the park. I asked if he had played with his ball. He nodded. I asked if his father had kicked the ball to him, back and forth the way they do, and he nodded. I ask if there was anyone else there in the park that they met. His chest fell, his eyes closed. He turned himself into a little stubborn ball. I smiled down at him. I stroked his face. I asked if he had a friend, a special friend he meets in the park. When at last he nodded I stroked his hair and face. I kissed his eyes. I thanked God the lying gene had not passed to him from Jermayne.

Now I had his father to confront. I waited two days. I told myself to wait another day, and when that day turned up I was still not ready. I told myself to wait until the weekend. On the Sunday night I told him. I told him what I had seen, then I told him to get out. He'd turned himself into someone I didn't recognise any more. I could not tolerate that stranger being under the same roof.

I had tried to have a baby of my own. I had tried so hard I lost all reason. I told Jermayne he needed to drink goat's milk. I must have read that somewhere. Someone who knew all about circadian rhythms told us to copulate under a full moon but not after 8pm. Jermayne wanted to know why not after 8pm. We had a row over that. Of course Jermayne assumed the problem had to lie with me. In those days I still listened to him. Jermayne is very clever with computers. He had his own business writing software. This is back when we were still part of the human race and Jermayne had not yet set us on a track apart. We talked about adoption. We even talked about adopting a Romanian or Russian child. But that was just talk. Neither one of us was up for that, but we went on talking as though we were, and I think it was just nice to pretend we had options. We were always going to adopt an African child. Then Jermayne had a different idea. He had been reading up on surrogacy. I listened as I did in those days with an open mind.