Dancing In The Shadows of Love (20 page)

‘Zahra,’ she panted. ‘Dear Little Flower! He loves you too. He does. He does. You
are
his beloved!’

‘No!’ I screamed and rattled her like a rag doll, not even questioning her use of my Daddy’s special name. She was so frail she was like air between my hands. ‘You lie. He turned away from me. He…turned…away…from me.’ After each word, I shook her shoulders and sobbed, until I was crying so hard I hardly heard her reply.

‘Because you weren’t ready! You weren’t ready for him yet.’ Her choking gulps penetrated my rage and I reached deep to find some of Zahra’s cool calm steel. I loosened my hands and dropped her back on her cushions. As I stepped away, my foot bumped the small vial of pills that had rolled off her table.

Her hands fluttered to her chest, to her blue-tinged lips and back to her chest as a grimace of pain wrenched her face. ‘My pills,’ she wheezed. ‘My heart pills.’

I stared down at the floor. There was a bottle marked
Lanoxin
lying next to my shoe. I looked at it a long while and remembered how hard Zahra had tried. How many years she had struggled to be loved. And how, always, this woman, this Grace, had stood before me and drawn away the light that could have saved Little Flower from her own
ezomo
. Without that light I was doomed already and, if she was gone, if I did not bend and pluck up the tablets, there would be no one standing between Zahra and love.

I closed my eyes and the multitude of my senses swept over me. There, in the distance, I saw the memory of Grace choking and coughing. Faintly, I smelt the hot sirocco wind as it blew grit along a road where a young rebel, greedy for all that was not his, held my pearls aloft. Great, roaring sobs, cleaving through the ocean of my heart, drowned all the memories, all of them. Only Little Flower moaned a requiem for an old dying woman, who had touched her cheek and offered her a love she could not recognise and had not known she wanted.

I dropped to my knees. My fingers scrabbled for the pills. ‘Come on, come on!’ I heard Little Flower urge me, but my hand shook so much and I cried so much, I dropped the bottle. Eventually I grasped it firmly enough to tap a pill into my hand. I crawled to the side of the bed, opened Grace’s mouth and put the pill in. I held the glass to her lips, water slopping over the sides as my hand shook. ‘Drink, Grace, please, please drink,’ I begged. ‘The pills will help.’

But the water dribbled out of the slack corners of her mouth.

I was too late.

Too late to save Grace.

And far too late to ever save myself.

“Are you like the painting of a sorrow,
A face without a heart?”

‘Enoch’s new to the
Court
. An Outlander,’ Jamila tells me. ‘He arrived a few weeks before you did. I didn’t think he belonged here, so I almost sent him away, but he said he’d been here before and knew
Prior
Ajani.’ She pulled a face. ‘Those leather clothes he wears are awful. And that long hair! He’ll never fit in here. Did you see he wears a
nova
as an earring?’

I suspect that Jamila has reservations about Enoch, as do I. I keep quiet, though; unsure whether my own odd notions about him make me hear wariness in Jamila’s tone.

‘How long will he work here?’ I ask.

She shrugs, and frowns down at the papers she shuffles. ‘As he’s a friend of our holy man, I suppose he’ll stay longer than I’d like.’ She holds up two pieces of paper. One, a soft pink. The other, an elegant cream and gold. ‘What do you think of these?’ she asks.

I press the save button to store the letter I’m typing. The wheels of my chair squeak as I roll it back, slamming the open drawer on my desk shut as I rise and walk to where she sits. I take the cream sheet and read:

Mrs Zahra Templeton
requests the pleasure of your company
at the marriage of her grandchild
Mr Dawud Bakari Templeton
to
Miss Jamila Anne Johnson.

‘Oh!’ Although not as easily as Jamila did, I dismiss thoughts of Enoch and the odd effect he has on me. ‘You’ve got the samples of your wedding invitations.’

‘I collected them from the printers on my way home from work yesterday.’ She doesn’t look at me but watches her finger, neatly manicured and painted nude beige, push the two invitations around the top of her desk. ‘Dawud likes the pink one, but I hate pink. Which do you prefer?’

I take my time. I pick them up and rub the different textures. The embossed gold words blur, but I keep up the pretence of examining these paltry pieces of paper, which, to Jamila, are clearly important.

Does Jamila grasp what her question means? Such a simple question, such a
normal
one for a friendship. But, although I fail to notice it in Jamila’s company, my skin has condemned me to a less than normal life. To share this moment, to have my opinion asked as if my answer is important…I gasp in a lungful of air to thaw my thoughts.

‘What’s wrong?’ Jamila asks. ‘Don’t you like them?’

I replace the invitations on her desk. ‘The cream one,’ I say. I can tell from the way she strokes it, she prefers it. ‘I like the cream one.’

‘Oh, do you? I like it because it’s so elegant and refined.’ Her reply is pensive and I have an urge to protect her, but from what dangers I cannot begin to guess.

‘It suits you.’

My words please her, although she doesn’t answer. She leans back in her chair and places her palms on top of the invitations, scattered on the desk. The cuffs of her soft lamb’s wool jersey—a pale green, like a forest blessed with sunshine after the rain—pull back to reveal slender wrists. There is a slim gold watch decorating one arm and it matches the triple golden chain she always wears around her neck. She crushes the pink invitation and throws it in the bin.

‘Dawud chose this,’ she says. ‘I hate pink. Only country girls wear pink.’

I bark a laugh at her feigned petulance. Jamila, in her own quiet way, has a grace that I lack.

‘That sounds good, Lulu,’
Prior
Ajani says from behind us. ‘To hear you laugh when—’

‘I have the proofs of my invitations,
Prior
Ajani,’ Jamila interrupts. She taps the cream and gold paper, drawing his attention. ‘I like this one best.’

As the old holy man strolls over to her desk, I move aside. ‘Do you want coffee,
Prior
Ajani?’ I ask. It’ll give Jamila more time to share her pleasure with him.

‘With extra sugar today, Lulu,’ he says.

I walk to the counter, surprised to find there’s no coffee bubbling away. Jamila, involved in her plans, must have forgotten. I prepare the coffee and, while the percolator hisses and spits, I watch her.

Her golden head bends close to the tufted baldness of
Prior
Ajani; with subtle grace, she digs out the discarded pink invite. The old man’s concentration, where he must have no real interest, doesn’t waver. I see it as a tribute to the way the people of St Jerome love sweet Jamila. Her joy is ours, for her charitable heart brings beauty to the court; her devotion and her friendship are too generous for her own good.

I take
Prior
Ajani his mug of coffee, and his pleasant, round face glows. ‘We’ve waited long enough for this day, haven’t we, Jamila?’

‘Nine years,’ Jamila sighs. I hear an echo of my own insecurity in her words. Did she think Dawud would never marry her? ‘Now it’s so close I can hardly believe it.’

‘Well, my dear,’ he says and pats her shoulder as he straightens, ‘we’ll celebrate with you.’

‘Of course you will,’ she says. ‘All of you! You’re the best of my friends!’ She includes me in the sweep of her approving gaze. My mouth goes dry as she adds, ‘I want it to be a perfect day. Of course, you’ll both celebrate with me!’

‘Me too?’ I dare to ask.

‘Of course,’ she says, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

But I’ve never been invited anywhere before. Not as a child in the holding camp, and not in the ten years I was in prison. I’m almost too scared to believe that I’ve understood her. Does she mean…could she mean…that I, too, will receive an invitation? Like an ordinary person. Like a friend.

Before I came to this court, I hadn’t cried since the time I became an unbeliever. Yet, here I am, unable to hold the tears back. I leave the office so they do not notice how moved I am. Some part of me, the part that ferments with tamped-down rage, fears their pity. An inevitable pity if they realise that such an ordinary thing as an invitation to a wedding is akin to a miracle. For, to one who has never had the luxury of normality, even the most mundane experience can be a transfiguration.

I hurry past the
nova
, its face blurred by trails of smoke drifting up from the incense smouldering on the altar. Have more soldiers died in the escalating War? A distant tragedy is not enough to dim the joy of new possibilities. Despite my skin, I’m enough of a friend to Jamila to be an honoured guest at her celebration…it’s almost enough to make me want to believe again.

‘Maybe you aren’t a fraud,’ I say to the face on the
nova
. In the dimness of the smoke, I imagine a faint smile curves those sad, wooden lips and I hear the memory of
Sub-Prioress
Dalia echo
I love you, I love you, I love…

I hurry away from the sound, out into the garden. I must tell Grace but, before I do, I must buy some white roses to put at the feet of the angel who guards her ashes. Outside the court gates that overlook the bright turquoise sea, today as calm as a deep, deep lake, the old crone still sits and sells her flowers. She is not alone.

Enoch is with her, his back to me, his beautiful hands shoved into his back pockets so the faded denim of his jeans pulls tight across his buttocks. His long hair, loose this morning, trails over the back of his jacket to fall between two angel wings, cracked gold and white where the paint and the leather has worn with age, or use, or both, and I am assailed with the headiness of hope.

Enoch who calls to me. I evade him, if I can, although the small court grounds make it difficult. His aura of danger usually makes me keep my distance but, on this day that offers so much, I watch him as he laughs at the old crone’s words.

His head rolls back. A slender silver
nova
dangles from his ear and glints in the sun as he takes a hand from his pocket to sweep it over her wrinkled cheek. He answers her in an ancient language, one I cannot understand and one that flows around me and over me and into me. It entices me to the outer edges of safety, there, at the court gate, too close to where he stands. I almost disregard the dangers of believing I can savour what he offers.

I try to ignore the thirst he rouses, deep in the love-parched plains of my essence. Jamila’s friendship is the pinnacle of any love I aspire to. Yet, I ache for more. I want to throw off my past, shed it as a snake sheds its skin, but, like
Sub-Prioress
Dalia, love too is a betrayer.

Softer emotions have had no place in my life. I clamp them down, hard, as I learnt to do in the past decade, but to no avail. I can’t stop yearning for that long slim hand to touch me with want, with need, for who I am beyond the skin, for who I was before I was the
Pale One
.

An innocent child, neither innocent nor child any longer, but a woman who cannot be a woman. One who can never be other than what I am. An outcast, an alien in a world that despises difference. A world that talks of forgiveness and love, the
Spirit King’s
love, which is as big a lie as the love
Sub-Prioress
Dalia showered me with, in the days when I believed.

The old crone sees me at the gate. She nods in my direction and murmurs to Enoch. He turns and it’s too late to bolt. His smile lights up his face, much the same as
Sub-Prioress
Dalia’s face did when she had read one of
Sub-Prioress
Kapera’s notes.

‘Come.’ He beckons me and the tattooed L-O-V-E flashes its untruth.

‘Where to?’ I ask. I do not move from the iron bars that separate us.

‘To the beach,’ he replies, and urges me to join him with a flick of his wrist. ‘You’ve never been there.’

‘I haven’t,’ I agree. ‘But I can’t go.’

He raises his eyebrows in surprise. ‘Why not?’

There is no simple answer to that simple question, so I shrug my shoulders in an eloquent reply. How can I tell him I cannot trust what he offers? Jamila offers me the only acceptance I need: my first chance to dance with life on the day she marries her beloved.

‘I have to work,’ I say. ‘After I buy some flowers for Grace.’ With finality, I add, ‘Anyway, the gate’s locked.’

‘No, it’s not,’
Prior
Ajani urges from behind me. ‘Go with Enoch. He’ll take care of you.’

The two men share a cloaked glance. I cannot begin to guess what they share.

‘Thanks,
Prior
,’ Enoch murmurs and inclines his head so his eyes shimmer with layer upon layer of mystery that pin me where I stand. I am lost, my spirit in grave danger, when he says, ‘Come with me, Lulu.’

I shake my head. ‘Jamila needs me,’ I say. I turn to walk back to the court office.

Prior
Ajani blocks my way. ‘Not as much as you think,’ he says. He takes my arm in a podgy clasp. Some angry part of me recognises that, with muscles honed over a decade of hard labour, I can break his grip with ease. Instead, I stand there and let him turn me back to face what I try to evade. He clicks the gate latch open with his free hand and swings the iron bars out of my path. ‘There,’ he beams, as he pushes me over the threshold, away from Jamila, and into the world that awaits me beyond the court gardens. ‘The gate is open after all.’

I hover between anger and fear. I harness the ripples that tense my muscles in defensive readiness and tell myself that this court is different to the other places I’ve lived. Here I have no enemies; in this simple world that pulses with the slow rhythm of ordinary lives and their small pleasures, I have only friends who would not hurt me.

‘When do you want me back?’ I ask.

‘Take your time! Take your time!’
Prior
Ajani encourages, clutching my arm as Enoch steps forward and takes my other arm.