Dancing In The Shadows of Love (26 page)

‘I have someone new for you, Mrs T,’ he would call as he brought other young girls to me. They had different names and different faces but they were the same as the child called Hope. I took them all in, until they were strong enough to leave.

Only Jamila stayed, but the stranger did not return.

“I will weep no more.”

Dawud has gone to war and I see less of Jamila. She begins most days with Chuki Samanya; more often than not, she ends them with the woman too. She’ll drive to the Samanya mansion after visiting Granny Zahra.

I arrive at the court ahead of the official opening hours. Jamila has given me the keys so I don’t have to wait for her to open. On the days when the rain shrouds the old city in greyness, I’m grateful for her trust. But the times I enjoy the most are those days she arrives early enough to share her life with me. I always put the coffee on to percolate and lay out her work, so we can have extra, precious, minutes together before the work day starts.

‘The printer called to say the final invitations are ready,’ she says. ‘After I’ve fetched them, I can start delivering them.’

‘I’ll help you,’ I say.

‘You’re so sweet, Lulu,’ she replies. ‘Chuki’s already offered to help.’

‘That’s okay.’ I shrug and try not to hurt. I tell myself that at least I will share her wedding day. It’s not her fault that I have no one else, while she has other friends.

Loneliness makes me grateful when Enoch also starts to arrive at the same time as I do. I’ll busy myself with routine chores—switching on the coffee percolator and computers, checking email, opening the snail mail—and he’ll reach into his leather jacket. He’ll pull out a rolled up newspaper, snapping the red elastic band loose and smoothing the paper out with long, firm strokes. He’ll sit at Jamila’s desk and read all the news, from births and obituaries to the death toll of all
The War
s fought in all the corners of the world.

We never say much, and we never talk about that day on the beach, or about what he reads in the papers. Yet, his presence comforts me.

Since the day Chuki Samanya invaded the court with her urbane boredom, I’ve wondered what there was between her and Enoch. Where had they met before? He’d scared her, made her anxious, until Jamila banished us both from the office.

‘I want to stay,’ I’d said, even as he pushed me out the door and closed it to shut me off from her.

‘You can’t,’ Enoch had answered. ‘
Prior
Ajani needs you.’

‘Jamila needs me. She’s not safe with that woman.’

‘She’s as safe as she wants to be,’ he’d said, and her laughter had drifted over us. How could I argue with that? But I wondered what he knew of Jamila and her friend Chuki Samanya. And I wondered about him.

Today, he sits slumped over the desk and scribbles copious notes in a thin, spidery script. Occasionally, he stops and flips through the pages of his newspaper as he searches out information. When he finds something that interests him, he bends his head and writes. Sometimes, he frowns as he writes and pushes the pencil hard into the pad, exorcising a turbid wrath. Other times, he nods and chuckles and sounds more like
Prior
Ajani than himself.

Curiosity drives me to ask. I pour him a cup of coffee and stroll across to where he sits. As I place the cup at his elbow, I say, ‘What are you doing?’

‘I like to record history,’ he replies.

‘History?’

‘Today’s news is tomorrow’s history,’ he says, and flexes his tattooed fingers around his pencil as he adds, ‘A person’s history—or a country’s—can tell you a lot about them. You can see where they’ve come from and what future they choose to have.’

The philosophical answer is so unexpected, so incongruous in one who looks like he does, with his long hair, his earrings and his tattoos that I bark out a laugh before I can stop myself. He laughs with me, as he did before, the day I met him, there in front of the wooden
nova
above the altar of St Jerome.

‘You don’t believe that I record history?’ he asks.

‘You don’t look the type.’

‘The type?’

‘You know. A nerd who likes history!’

‘Why can’t I be interested in history and philosophy?’

‘Uh—’ I sense a trap in his question, but I still forge ahead. ‘Only intellectuals care about dead people and old news.’

He quirks his eyebrows and asks, although it is more of a statement, ‘You don’t think I’m an intellectual?’

‘Oh, come on, Enoch!’ I point to his leather jacket. ‘You’re a biker. A Hell’s Angel. Why would you care about world history or the boring lives of ordinary people?’

‘They’re not boring to me,’ he says. His eyes fill with a challenge that echo my words back, before he adds, ‘Even though you look at my clothes and my tattoos and slot me into your prejudice.’

‘I didn’t mean—’ A flash in his eyes stops the lie. We both know I
had
meant it. I had judged him on what he looked like.

‘It’s easy, isn’t it?’

‘What is?’ I ask, but I concede what I’ve done. I’ve shown that I see the leather and the tattoos, the long hair and the biker before I see
him
, the essence of Enoch. How often have I complained that people judge me by what I look like and don’t see that my difference is no deeper than my colourless skin?

His gaze does not waver over the rim of his coffee cup, until I blurt, ‘Okay! I’m sorry.’

‘You won’t judge,’ he says, ‘if you look with your inner eye. Let your heart’s voice speak. That’s where you’ll find the truth of the matter.’

He replaces his cup on the tabletop, dips his head and continues to write. I am angry and ashamed. He’s shown a side of me that makes me doubt the pain I’ve suffered all my life. Was it real? How easily I deceived myself when a quiet lie made it comfortable to blame others for the barrenness of my memories.

I cough to clear the obstruction in my throat. ‘So,’ I ask, ‘what do you like most? Human interest stories? Politics? Wars?’

‘All,’ he replies. ‘They’re intertwined.’

I snort. ‘They are not. Someone like me can’t really stop a war. All that will happen is I’ll die for my country and be forgotten.’

‘You’d be surprised. Make different choices for yourself and you can give mankind a different history.’

‘Changing your life is difficult,’ I say. ‘If not impossible.’ I brood on the
Spirit King
who stripped me of normality even in my mother’s womb. How could I change that even if, incredibly, it could mean the end of another war?

‘It’s worth a try, isn’t it?’ Enoch asks me. ‘To learn to listen with the heart and come to know what love is.’

I nod, the protests I want to make clamped behind my lips. If sweet Dalia couldn’t love me, who could? Perhaps Jamila, when she invites me to her wedding, or touches my shoulder and tells me Chuki Samanya isn’t her only friend. Chuki Samanya. The name heralds the scent of danger that shrouds Jamila.

‘I’m worried about Jamila,’ I say to Enoch.

‘Don’t be,’ he answers. He doesn’t lift his head. ‘She’ll write her own history. As we all do.’

I clench my teeth to stop the angry words, but they spill out anyway. ‘I didn’t write my history.’ I pinch a piece of skin on my arm and jerk it. ‘I didn’t choose
this
. I was born with it! Do you think any sane person would choose to suffer
this
if we could all write our own lives?’

‘Your skin is your grace,’ he says and continues to write in that damned notebook until I want to snatch it away and force him to look at me, really look at me and what I have suffered through no choice of my own. A life empty of love and a life empty of hope.

‘It’s my
nova
,’ I shout. ‘It’s all that people ever see.’ Before my rage breaks the banks of my control, I run from the office. But, even as I flee, he captures me.

‘
Nova
or grace, Luyando, you can make the choice,’ he calls after me. ‘Remember how easy it is to judge others for what you yourself are capable of.’

As I pause for breath in the nave of the court, I want to hate him for reminding me that I, too, have judged him by his difference.

I remember the time when I believed Dalia loved me. When I felt loved even as I loved. There’d been peace around me then. The holding camp girls had no longer punished me and I had no longer hated them.

All that hate because they had seen my skin colour but not my essence. Yet in the time of Dalia’s love, my difference hadn’t mattered to either them or me. Before love, the arrows of hate had flown between us. Back and forth, back and forth. But, when I was cushioned by love, I’d let the arrows of their hatred fall dead to the ground. I’d not bent to pick them up. Nor had I re-poisoned them with my own hatred, intending to hurl them back. No, I’d smiled and smiled in love. Over time, the others, my foes, had started to smile back and, eventually, our weapons had lain forgotten and unused at our feet.

Until my friend, Dalia, had betrayed me and I began to hate once more.

Here at the court in this
Old Sea City
, how can I hate when an undercurrent, dense and redolent with love, envelops me from all sides? It consumes me. There is no way to escape, but to stumble to the altar and prostrate myself on the cold stone floor, until my panic becomes peace and I can remember my hate, but neither suffer it nor feed it.

‘Have you hurt yourself, Lulu?’ Jamila speaks over me. I open my eyes and clash with her green gaze. There’s concern there, touched with an emptiness that wasn’t there before Dawud went to war.

‘I’m fine,’ I say and feel foolish. ‘Look at all the different colours.’ I lift an arm and point up to the triforium gallery, with its stained glass arches lit by the morning sun. ‘They’re beautiful,’ I sigh. ‘I’ve never noticed before.’ I realise I speak the truth. Since I arrived at St Jerome I’ve cleaned the nave every day, but I’ve not seen the veiled beauty that’s been there, above me, all this time.

Jamila briefly contorts herself. ‘The glass is dusty,’ she says. ‘And you’d better get up from the floor. You can’t lie down in the courthouse. Where’s your respect for the
Spirit King
?’

‘Leave her be.’
Prior
Ajani peers over Jamila’s shoulder, his cheerful, chubby face visible over the top of a large cardboard box he carries. He bends, placing the box on the ground and, before either of us can guess his intentions, he lays on his back next to me.

I turn my head, my cheek chafed by the rough slate. His round belly protrudes from the folds of his
chuba
to reveal a patterned shirt, in orange, pink, and lime-green flowers. He spreads his arms until the tips of his finger touch mine.

‘How beautiful,’ he sighs. ‘A symphony of different colours, dancing in harmony.’

‘
Prior
Ajani!’

Jamila sounds distressed. I start to move, slow and sluggish, weighted by the essence of this place.
Prior
Ajani moves too, enough to clasp my wrist and prevent me from rising. ‘Stay,’ he says. ‘There’s also joy in watching a sunbeam. Where better than here?’ He turns his head, the few tufts of white hair that cover his baldness uncombed as usual, and now richly coloured with a reflection of the
Spirit King’s
Eidolon Warriors
in victorious battle over the
Levid
.

I start to laugh. I laugh so hard the sound floats upwards and mingles with the flickering colours as the sun rises higher and streams into the nave.

Prior
Ajani laughs too. I hear him say. ‘Join us, Jamila, and see what the
Spirit King
looks like from a different angle.’

I stop when Jamila, tight-lipped, shakes her head and picks up the box he discarded. ‘This is…inappropriate,’ she says and disappears into the office.

Prior
Ajani and I lie in silence. Somehow, the colours have lost their lustre and I’m no longer at peace.

‘Not everyone believes the colours can dance,’ the old
Prior
murmurs. He rolls over with a groan. ‘And I shouldn’t be lying here at my age.’

I spring upright and help him stand. ‘I like your shirt,’ I tease as I brush off the specks of dust on his
chuba
and rearrange it. It falls into neat folds and hides the brightness of the multi-coloured flowers adorning the shirt he wears beneath it.

Another laugh rocks him back on his feet. ‘I like colours,’ he says. ‘The
Spirit King
doesn’t only live in black and white.’

I shrug, uncomfortable as I remember Jamila’s disquiet, but stay to watch the last of the colours fade from the altar as the sun rises too high to shine into the nave. As suddenly as they appeared, they’re gone. If I hadn’t witnessed it myself but a few moments ago, I wouldn’t have dreamt such beauty existed.

The
Spirit King
-figure on the
nova
draws my gaze. Had I known this beauty before? Had it ever existed? Or had I missed seeing it in the despair of life’s realities? I hear Enoch’s words echo in my mind.
Nova
or grace, Luyando, you must make your choice.
Have I looked only at the pain of my skin—my life—for so long I’m no longer able to see that the colour of love depends on what view I choose?

This maelstrom of uncertainty has beckoned before, a black tide that reaches out from the altar and pours down from the wooden
nova
. It threatens me, as Enoch did, the day on the beach when I forgot myself enough to cry into his cedar-scented embrace.

Oblivion roils within me; it comes from my depths. Does it seek to destroy the incandescent colours that dance together despite their differences? Or does it seek to make me one with their beauty? Either way, the limbo that traps me keeps me standing in the shadows, unable to dance in the colours of love that await my discovery.

Enoch saw the truth about me that day on the beach: until I can love, I am not free. I am merely out of prison.

Aware of how the sun lights up the colours that live in the windows of St Jerome’s court, I begin to hunger. Can the sun rise and scorch away the
ezomo
of my skin, so that I am free of the loveless cage I’ve lived in for longer than I can remember?