Dancing In The Shadows of Love
Read Dancing In The Shadows of Love Online
Authors: Judy Croome
Judy Croome
Contents
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For Beric, always
Lulu is different to others. Once, she believed, she had a friend to love her. Then that friend betrayed her and Lulu learned that hate is safer than love. When she begins her new life at the
Court
of St Jerome in the
Old Sea City
, she finds people who must fight their personal demons of hatred, ambition and greed. Embraced in St Jerome's fold, Lulu learns to trust again, perhaps even to love.
Nothing, however, is as it seems and Lulu discovers that love doesn't always wear the face of the one you yearn to call beloved.
Lyrical and atmospheric, buoyed by touches of magical realism, this compelling, spiritual story explores the sacrifices people make in the pursuit of their dreams. Lulu’s quest, and that of Jamila and Zahra too, is to find the divine love that will fulfil their hopes and save their souls…if they can recognise the masks of those who seek to lead them astray.
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There is only one language, the language of the Heart.
There is only one religion, the religion of Love.
Sri Sathya Sai Baba (Mystic, 1926-2011)
Lulu (The Past)
“I shall despair. There is no creature loves me;
and, if I die, no soul will pity me.”
I stopped believing in promises when I was young.
‘You’ll be happy here,’ they said, as they bundled me into the car that would take me to the Sacred Heart Holding Camp. I was five years old. ‘Children like you have fun in the Camps. You’ll have friends to play with. You won’t miss your mother.’ Why they thought I would miss the woman who abandoned me because my skin was too pale and my hair too white is still a mystery.
We left the City of Gold—a misnomer if ever I heard one—and headed south. The drab and narrow streets, huddled between tall, concrete skyscrapers on either side, gave way to long stretches of highway; this, in turn, surrendered to wide open spaces as we travelled away from the sun.
As one day changed into the next, the vegetation became sparser and sparser until only a few quiver trees stood scattered amongst the dust and rocks that lined the dirt road we bumped along. Their multitude of fat succulent branches, crowned with spiky blue-green leaves, arrowed out of a single trunk. Stretches of sand and rock and clumps of dry stubby grass isolated each tree from the next.
Long before we arrived, I saw the camp in the distance. At first the dust kicked up by the tyres, and the haze of heat we’d followed since the sun rose, softened the view. It looked welcoming; a haven, nestling in the foothills of the forbidding Droogrivier Mountains. As we drove closer, the silhouette sharpened into three buildings. Built in an L-shape, they were square and squat. A patch of green and white—it looked like a small rose-garden, struggling to survive—broke the dullness. Beyond that, lining the dry old riverbed that gave the mountains their name, a hedge of buffalo-thorn trees, with delicate branches and double-hooked thorns, offered a meagre welcome. There were no other signs of life.
The man switched off the engine and we sat in the heat until, ‘Come,’ he eventually said. ‘There must be someone to sign you in.’
He climbed out of the old Jeep and opened the car door. I scrambled down, but he did not offer to hold my hand as we approached the heavy wooden doors. He clanged the old brass bell that hung from a hook underneath a sign that proclaimed “Sacred Heart Holding Camp: Home for the Unwanted.” Above the sign was an effigy of the
Spirit King
; the doors had large
novas
carved in their centre to remind us that this was a holy place.
As we waited for the noise of the doorbell to die, a gust of wind captured unwary grit and leaves, refusing to release them until they struck my bare legs, stinging them with a million pinpricks of pain. An old windmill creaked into life, the dull clacking ominous in the vast silence of the inhospitable landscape.
‘You never said she was a
Pale One
,’ the
Controllers
complained when they let us in.
After the city man left, they forced me to my knees, before yet another statue of the
Spirit King
, nailed to a colossal wooden
nova
in the small court, behind the holding camp’s dining room. His face, carved in ivory, was harsh with the suffering of his people. Black horsehair curls drifted downward over a coral bead pressed into the centre of his forehead and this symbol of his ancient and divine ancestry mocked me from between the empty slits that were his eyes.
‘Ask the
Spirit King
for forgiveness,’ they said.
‘For what?’ I dared ask.
‘Your
Great Error
is your skin; your white, white skin,’ and they pushed me so hard I fell to the ground.
The callous stone floor scraped through the thin calico of my dress. I flinched, but welcomed the pain. If I appealed hard enough to him, perhaps the
Spirit King
would love me. It’s what he promised: to love me, no matter how great my error. He would paint my hair and my skin as black as the other children, as black as it should have been were I not born an outcast by virtue of the paleness of my skin.
‘Cleanse yourself and you will be whole,’ the
Controllers
chanted. To ward off any contamination from my aberrant appearance, they would make the
sign of the nova
, lifting their hands to brush their foreheads, their mouths, their hearts, in an age-old gesture of subservience.
‘What did I do? Why don’t the others want to play with me?’ I asked
Sub-Prioress
Dalia one day. ‘Why does the
Spirit King
hate me?’
Although, in the end, she wasn’t courageous enough,
Sub-Prioress
Dalia—the youngest of the
Controllers
, her round face framed by her black-and-white
pandita
—had not yet forgotten what compassion was.
‘He loves you, child. You’re the
Spirit King’s
special angel,’ she whispered. She slipped a white rose next to my pillow and bent to kiss my chafed knees. ‘Believe it.’
Then, I believed her. Then, I asked and asked for her to be my friend, to ease the loneliness. Even the quiver tree had the tiny sugarbird as its winter visitor when it came to eat the tender yellow buds sacrificed by the tree. Like those isolated trees, all I wanted was one friend; one beloved to compensate, in some small way, for all that I suffered in my difference.
• • •
By the time I was fourteen, I had learned the lesson well: believe no one’s promises. Except, perhaps, the promise of my beloved.
‘Lulu? Lulu!’ Exasperation twined itself around the
Prioress’s
call. Leader of the
Controllers
, if she spoke, she was obeyed. ‘Where
has
that child disappeared to?’
I could have told her but I did not. Hunted again, I pressed myself deeper into the undergrowth and ignored the bite of thorns into my pale and vulnerable skin.
‘She’s hiding,’
Sub-Prioress
Kapera answered. Close, she was too close. I rooted myself as close to the ground as I could. Already I had learnt to depend on myself.
Sub-Prioress
Kapera was quick to teach me that. ‘She’s the
Levid’s
child, that one,’ she said. I imagined the sly
sign of the nova
she made, to ward off any unsettled spirits I bring.
‘Shush,’ said the
Prioress
, ‘the child may hear you.’ A silence followed, broken by the heavy sullenness of
Sub-Prioress
Kapera’s footsteps. ‘Lulu?’ the
Prioress
called again. ‘Answer me, child. I want to talk to you, not punish you.’
She lied. They all did. Every word they spoke was a punishment. For if they could find a way to evade me, they did; even the plump
Prioress
, Leader of the
Controllers
. It showed in the way they glanced over me, and not at me, when they spoke. It showed in what they said, when they thought I did not listen. Was it because I was young, I wondered, that they talked about me when I stood right beside them? Or was it because I am what I am that I was invisible?
Why, I sometimes asked the
Spirit King
, why do they hate me? The
Spirit King
never answered, but the mirror told me why. Born a
Pale One
, I am different. A freak. White skin where there should be black. Pink where there should be white around my eyes. Brass curls cup my head, when they should be a soft sooty black.
That time they stalked me because of the girl, Taki.
• • •
All I wanted, when the
Prior
arrived with new toys after the morning service, was to play with Taki and her friends. To be their friend.
Scrawny in his dingy
chuba
, the holy
Prior
looked like a crow proud of its scavenging. He pressed the tatty plastic bags, familiar with their red, blue and white logo, into
Sub-Prioress
Kapera’s clasp and, as he always did, brushed close to whisper his secrets.
The toys were never new: a doll’s clothes, mended with small neat stitches, and a painted truck, dulled by love. Other children had scuffed the newness off them.
That day the younger girls got a ball. We got a game called pick-up-sticks. The shabby box, held together by worn tape, had no instructions.
Sub-Prioress
Dalia showed us how to play. She let each of us have a turn, until we understood the rules.
When my turn came, I lay on my stomach, crouched close to the sticks because my eyesight already showed the weakness of my kind. I ignored the chatter of the other girls and, with steady patience, diminished the pile, stick by stick.
As the heap next to me grew larger while the one in front disappeared, the buzz of chatter sputtered out.
Sub-Prioress
Dalia murmured quiet words of encouragement until, as I picked up the last stick, she clapped. ‘Well done, Lulu! Look, girls, Lulu’s got them
all
!’
Quivering at her praise, I held out the last thin spike. My grin must have looked foolish to the circle of faces around me.
‘Ergh,’ said Taki. ‘The freak can smile.’
‘Don’t look! Don’t look! You’ll go blind,’ another girl shouted. I never could remember afterwards who cried out. The howls of laughter bewildered
Sub-Prioress
Dalia.
‘Stop!’ she said. ‘Stop at once!’ The meek threat had no effect and, above the chorus of taunts, she added a more forceful one. ‘I’ll fetch
Sub-Prioress
Kapera to deal with you!’
The door slammed behind her, and they gathered around me like thunderclouds over an anthill. I hunched my shoulders and tucked my head between them as I began my appeal. ‘O Great
Spirit King
, warrior wild…,’ I chanted. Inadequate protection for what came next, I mumbled on as the first shoe struck, ‘Look upon a little child…’