The Gloaming (17 page)

She moves her jaw back and forth. ‘No shit.'

‘We weren't extravagant.'

‘You don't know what you're talking about.' Her tone is suddenly savage. ‘You go to the bank and get a thousand bucks and do not even fucking blink. Imagine, imagine that you could only get, maybe on a good day, forty. You'd stand there while the machine made its noises, like it's trying to decide whether to give you the cash or tell you, “Hey, loser, there are insufficient funds to cover this transaction.”'

She places her hands flat on the table, creating a triangle with her body. She's suddenly like an animal which can make itself bigger to ward off attackers. ‘Doll,' she hisses. ‘Money changes everything. With money James would still be alive. And that's
everything
. My son was
everything
.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Now, isn't that the most
useless
fucking word. Oops. James would be alive if I'd had money. Sorry. And you're
sorry?
' She shuts her eyes for a moment and when she opens them there are tears. These she wipes away furiously, angry that Mary, soft Mary, is leaking out. ‘My boy, my sweet boy's head exploded with a bullet. And there is not a single morning I wake up and my first thought isn't about him, and I'm not hoping that when I open my eyes I'll be in the past, where he is. Money gives you choices, doll. It gives you good schools and nice neighborhoods, and if those fail, it gives you lawyers. You don't even see that. You've lost nothing in your life but a dumbass husband and you think boohoo-boo-fucking-hoo, so sorry for yourself.'

She pauses here to sniff and exhale. ‘Sorry is the ashes of your child in your hands blowing into the wind.'

All that comes from my mouth is one syllable: ‘O.' But this is attached to a string of invisible Os that sound in my head like the women outside the Bomba Hospital ululating O-O-O-O. I am terrified of the gaping tomb that is Gloria. How deep, how wide, how bottomless the pit and what lives down there, what forms in the dark, in the mud of the soul. The sound, listen close, I can almost hear, between the sobbing and the weeping there is the mumbling, the muttering of spells.

‘I have to go,' I say. And I almost run, knocking over a chair on the way out.

*

The lights sparkle on the dark sea like fallen stars. The fishermen are far out on the continent's edge in wooden boats with patched cloth sails. They light kerosene lamps to attract the fish on which they depend. But to the observer, the lights are decorative, ornate.

Waves break on the reef. I can hear the rushing of surf. I imagine the foam, pale and blue in the moonlight, the moon-dappled sea, the nets sinking quietly below. Do the fishermen ever fear the sea and its dark, unfurling possibility?

I pour another glass of wine, cheap South African stuff. Tom would be mortified. Tom will never know. There's a power cut, so I'm sitting in the dark. I want it to be quiet, but the expats in the big house down the street have a generator, and so we must suffer juggernaut noise for their uninterrupted light and TV.

On the table in front of me is the box. I run my hands over the fraying cardboard. I think about the person this once was: a young man, perhaps, a son, a brother, loved in the rambling, careless way of a too large family; protected as much as possible from the shame of his white skin, his ugliness, his need to stay out of the sun.

When he was a boy some children from school tied him to a fence so he would get sunburned. The pain was excruciating: his clothes felt like sandpaper. His skin peeled off in sheets, and they laughed and called him a lizard.

Years later, he got a job, washing dishes in a fish restaurant in Mwanza. He had friends, and maybe even a girl who didn't mind how he looked. She was dark-skinned, ebony, and wore a bright yellow shirt that seemed like a fabulous conspiracy—the darkness of her skin, the brightness of her shirt. He knew men hunted his kind. So he was vigilant. One of his brothers always came to the restaurant to walk him home after dark. He slept with the door locked. But they were waiting, one night: first they clubbed his brother, and then they took him, put him in the back of a car. Tied him up. He paid attention on the drive, he took in everything—the dark night and the intermittent lights, the smell of the car, of the men, of the night itself, damp from recent rains; the wide and forever darkness expanding across Africa; the sound of the car rattling on the road, the brakes squealing when it finally stopped. He did not protest or beg, he knew there was no point. He knelt down and looked straight ahead. He felt calm with certainty, but also he was tremendously sad. He saw through the dark, across the miles they'd driven to where his girl lay sleeping in her yellow shirt. He went to her, lay with her, put his arms around her warm body and she whispered his name.

And then the men cut his throat.

There must have been screaming. He would have screamed. A man dying to feed the hate of another. How does such a transaction come to pass? What kind of wrong extracts such a price? Who is the accountant?

I notice the neighbors' generator has stopped pounding. But the lights haven't come back on, so perhaps it ran out of diesel. I need to be outside, and push open the door. The air is humid and so heavy with salt it almost coats my skin. The tide has ebbed. The night is soft, lapping. I stand on the little headland above the mangroves and listen to the sucking of the sea, the popping of seaweed, and far beyond, just audible, the ocean against the reef. Everything is moist and sucking and briny, constantly rejuvenated by the return of the sea. I think about the incessant regularity of the tides, how they come and go, unlike the rain inland that fails or floods, or the northern seasons that falter or linger. The sea washes the shore every day, with whispering possessiveness, forever and ever.

Martin stands beside me. I didn't hear him arrive.

But then I'm only imagining him.

He lights up his imaginary cigarette. Ha ha ha.

‘What do you want, Martin?'

‘It's not easy being a mercenary.' His Rooster is the only light, a fierce ember. I imagine him extinguishing it on the back of my neck. ‘Africa is full of problems people want solved. Do you know the last time I took a holiday?'

‘No. When?'

‘Ages. Fucking years. So don't go anywhere else. Don't piss me off. I've booked a week in Mauritius. A package deal, all inclusive, non-refundable, you see.'

‘I see, yes.'

Somewhere Jamhuri snores softly. The fishermen's lights glitter on the reef, far out. And Martin steps away.

It's strange—isn't it—how I can take all the bits of the story and fit them one way, or another. I can make Martin appear and disappear. I can make him a mercenary in need of a holiday or a rapist or a man with a broken car. I can conjure a woman in a yellow shirt and the pale-skinned man who loved her.

I remember what Strebel said about narrative. But what he didn't make clear enough was how malleable the narrative might be, how slippery the stories. Physics might fix the course of a moving vehicle away from a dog. But what of the non-physical world?

There's a feeling I have now of crowding, shouting possibilities—that every version is true. And none. Put Martin here beside me. Leave him in Magulu, or at a titanium mine run by South Africans. Take away the tulip tree above me. Take away the mangroves and the sea. Put a different piece of cloth in a jar. In a cave. Or not in a cave.

I was mistaken. The fabric only looked like Sophie's dress. The red cotton flannel with white and yellow flowers.

I was right. It's the same, the exact same.

It can't be a coincidence.

It is a coincidence.

There's a cup in the sink, a hammer in the corner of a dark room. The fuel pump was never broken. The pieces of the cooking pot were found. The girl's cervix dilated and the baby was born, happy, wailing. The couple and their lost dog were found, they are alive and well in a suburb of London.

All I had to do was turn around and go back to Tom and take his hand in mine and whisper, ‘Let's have a child.' And we walked on beside the golden lake. Elise faded, a stranger, someone we wouldn't recall ever having met.

 

Harry is at the Yacht Club bar. His face lights up. ‘Hello, pet.' He orders me a beer. I drink it very quickly. He raises his eyebrows, but orders another. I think Harry would be perfectly happy if I became his drinking buddy. Possibly, I might, too, in a numb, muffled way. He wants to chat, wants to know what I've been up to. I tell him I went to the caves with Gloria.

‘Gloria hates the caves. Why the hell did she take you there? It's a godawful place.'

‘I have no idea,' I say. But I do. The idea creeps up my arm like a caterpillar. I take the beer, down nearly half of it. ‘What don't you like about the caves?'

‘Bad,' he says and takes a swig of his beer.

‘Bad?'

He laughs now, but not really.

‘Why are the caves bad, Harry?'

He shakes his head and pushes back from the bar, as if he might leave. But he can't, I know that. I lean in, whisper gently, ‘Harry, I'm in trouble. Something happened at the caves that I don't understand. I saw something that maybe was left for me. A message. But I'm not sure. So I need you to tell me about the caves.'

‘Why did she take you there.' It's not a question anymore.

‘Tell me, Harry.'

He licks his lips, then moistens them more with beer. ‘Jesus,' he says. And takes a long draft. There's a new feeling about him and I think it might be fear. ‘I didn't see you coming.'

‘Harry, you're not making any sense.'

‘Sense? You want sense? Darling, don't stick around here.'

I put my hand on his, very deliberately, my soft, young hand over his gnarled mitt. Go on, I say with my hand. He puts his other hand over mine, and gives it a pat.

‘I'm cursed,' he says.

‘What kind of a curse?'

‘I wasn't always like this, a sad old sod.'

I wait, and after half a beer, he obliges. ‘A young couple went missing in the caves.'

‘Yes,' I say. ‘The guide told me.'

‘People heard them for days. Longer. A week. They'd gone looking for their dog, that's what the theory was. But no one could find them. Too many echoes, too many tunnels.' He takes another sip, Dutch courage. ‘The local police even brought a sniffer dog from Nairobi. But it couldn't smell anything because of the bat guano.'

I imagine them, the young couple, entering the caves with their little dog, the dog disappearing, their searching for him, possibly falling, possibly climbing into the hole. They lost their way, slowly, turn by turn, and did not quite appreciate the calamity: they thought they were found; they heard their friends calling for them; they thought they were going to be all right. And then terror when the voices faded.

‘Did you know them?'

Harry shakes his head. ‘Sisal people. Expats. Before my time.'

‘Then what do they have to do with you?'

‘Messengers. They were messengers.'

‘They were bringing you a message?'

‘She was. She came to me. She was pretty like you. Slim, dark hair. She was trying to help.'

‘What was the message, Harry?'

The bar fills up and the noise gives Harry somewhere to hide. Sikhs in neat turbans and twined beards are laughing at the bar with plump Tanzanian men, with yachtees, with crusty old-timers like Harry. Three young Muslim men play darts while their wives in black abayas drink Cokes. Beyond us, the dark sea filters out, taking the fishermen with it.

I touch Harry's hand again, and he's about to go on, but—

‘Hi, there.'

It's Gloria.

‘Christ,' says Harry under his breath.

She says, ‘Harry still telling you his glory-day stories?'

Finishing his beer, Harry takes a deep breath and finds himself again. ‘Why aren't you home polishing your broomstick?'

‘Oh, that's funny.' Gloria looks at me. ‘We had a fling, Harry and I. It didn't end well.'

‘Ended just fine for me,' Harry retorts.

‘The thing is. The thing
was
,' says Gloria. ‘He had all these stories. And then he just stopped calling. Acting like he hardly knew me. It took me a while to figure out he'd simply run out of stories. He's nothing more than his stories. A comic book.'

‘I never enjoyed scorning a woman, Gloria. But you—it was a pleasure.'

Gloria appears to ignore this. ‘Harry was quite the adventurer. Did he tell you about the goats?'

‘Is this necessary?' There's an odd tremor in his voice, a return to the uncertain ground of the caves.

‘Come on, Harry. She's not going to sleep with you.'

I don't want this, don't want Gloria's elliptical conversation, her bitterness peeking out like a blood-red petticoat. I start to get down from the bar stool, but Gloria puts her hand on my shoulder possessively: ‘About twenty years ago now, Harry was screwing this woman whose husband owned a bean farm out near Tabora.'

Harry looks straight ahead.

‘No,' I say because I don't want to hear this. I don't want to hear any more stories. I want to leave quickly, but I'm a little drunk and I can't get my bag off the back of the chair. The strap is all tangled.

‘The woman's husband was away in Nairobi—Betty, wasn't that her name?' Gloria is merciless. ‘So Harry decides to fly in and fuck her. It's late in the day and he's been drinking at a bar in Arusha, the Discovery Club, I think it was, but that doesn't stop hero Harry. Oh no. It's a bush strip at dusk, and when he lands he hits a herd of goats.'

Harry says, quietly, ‘Do you want me to finish the story?'

Gloria hesitates, and for a moment I see Mary revealed, a woman brutalized by life. Gloria could stop this right now, could wave a hand and laugh, move the conversation on to something benign. But she doesn't. She looks to Harry.