The Memory of Love (24 page)

Nothing, save the scratch of pencil upon paper.

‘Perhaps I could have your name.’

He looked up. ‘Johnson.’

‘Mr Johnson. I am happy to help you in any way I can. But I would like to use the facilities before we continue.’

He put down his pencil. ‘The problem is this,’ he explained slowly, as if he was talking to a moron. ‘The toilets on this floor are reserved for staff use. Somebody will have to take you to the correct floor to use the ones there.’

‘Perhaps, then, I could have your permission to use the staff toilets?’

He stared at me, before replying, deadpan, ‘I am afraid I do not have the authority to allow that. It is better we continue here,’ he tapped the paper with the end of his pencil, ‘and finish. Then you can go.’ He continued to gaze at me. The man was a small-time sadist, pedantry his weapon of choice. I felt a trickle of rage in my belly. I wanted to hit him.

For an hour more he questioned me. I hid nothing. I had nothing to hide. Eventually he put away his pencil and his notes, opened the door and called somebody. I was led to the toilets. The junior officer who accompanied me insisted that the cubicle door remain open. I turned my back on him, unzipped my fly and urinated. I had held on so long there was as much pain as relief in the act. At first the piss was slow in coming; when it hit the bowl it was lurid and evil-smelling.

I was shown back to the same room, which was empty. No sign of Johnson, of his papers, or my cake.

‘Am I free to go?’ I said.

‘One minute, please.’ My guide trundled off. I waited. A long minute passed. The air in the room was hot now and the smell of sweat was my own. I could have removed my jacket, but I chose not to, for to do so felt like some sort of submission. Neither did I sit down again. I walked about a bit, as much as I could in the confined space. The room was five paces long. Four paces wide. A half-hour must have passed before Johnson reappeared.

At the sight of him I felt a cold gust of anger. I said, ‘Are we through yet?’

‘Oh yes.’ His manner was amiable.

I was in no mood for it. ‘Am I then free to go?’

‘Yes, yes. There are one or two formalities to attend to. Forgive me if I delay you a few minutes further. None of it should take long. You did say you were not teaching today.’ He was amusing himself at my expense. ‘Do sit.’

‘I’m perfectly fine as I am, thank you.’

‘You will be more comfortable if you sit.’

I didn’t move but remained standing in the same spot. Johnson, too, stayed where he was, arms folded in front of him, and watched me. The seconds ticked past. I could hear the sound of rain, a rushing in the distance, ponderous drops from the eaves of the building and from tree branches. I was aware of Johnson’s eyes upon me, regarding me as though I were a querulous child. I felt petulant and aggrieved. My head ached and I experienced a strange and sudden urge to cry. He had even stolen my cake.

Johnson cleared his throat. ‘You will be more comfortable if you sit.’

I was about to decline a second time when I changed my mind, seeing how absurdly I was behaving. I was only delaying my own departure.

‘Fine.’ I walked across the room, seized a chair and dragged it into the middle of the floor. I sat down.

Johnson crossed to the door. ‘Be assured I’ll try not to keep you waiting any longer than necessary, Mr Cole. Just a few minutes.’ He smiled minimally, and as he left the room he turned the key in the lock behind him.

I had been wrong about Johnson. There was nothing civil about him at all.

I waited. Outside the rain eased off, slowing to a distant patter. I listened to the drip, drip of the run-off from the roof. I sat for an hour or so in the failing light until, without warning, the overhead light went on. A switch on the other side of the door. I called out, but nobody answered. A numbness was spreading across my buttocks. The heat had gone from the day and the room seemed suddenly cold. I stood up. I went to the door and banged. I counted to five. I banged again.

Nothing.

CHAPTER 23

‘Is it true,’ says the child Abass, voice juddering as he bounces on the car’s back seat, ‘that the number of stars in the sky is infinity?’

From the driving seat Kai glances back at him. ‘Nobody knows how many stars are in the sky. Nobody knows where the universe ends, so you could say there are an infinite number of stars in the sky. Yes.’

‘How many zeros does infinity have?’

‘A never-ending number.’

‘Never-ending,’ echoes Abass, trying the words out for size, staring from the window as they pass a palm plantation. His eyes switch back and forth from one row to the next, he begins to experiment, closing one eye and then the other.

‘Imagine you tried to drive to the ends of the earth,’ continues Kai. ‘You’d just go round and round, you’d never get to the end of your journey. Think of that as zeros.’

Silence for a while, between the three of them. Adrian can almost hear the whirring cogs of the kid’s imagination. His mind turns to the old man in the room at the hospital and his memories of the moon walk. Adrian had been ten when the moon walk happened. He remembered being in his grandparents’ house, sitting on the rug watching the television across the expanse of the coffee table. His father’s voice explaining what was happening. Calling Adrian to sit by him. His father had been well then.

‘When I was your age,’ says Adrian, then clears his throat. It has been a while since he spoke to a child. Kai has an easy way with Abass, whom he treats as a smaller and more vulnerable version of himself. It’s a matter of hitting the right note. ‘I mean, my father once explained to me how to think of infinity, the only way you could keep the idea in your head.’

‘What did he say?’ Abass comes to lean between the seats; he smells of lemons and soap.

‘He told me to think of a big block of stone a thousand miles long, a thousand miles high, and a thousand miles wide.’

‘That’s a
huge
block!’

‘A huge block,’ concurs Adrian. ‘OK, now imagine a tiny bird, like a sparrow.’

‘What’s a sparrow?’

‘Well, any tiny bird. Like that one!’ Adrian points at a movement between trees. ‘Now imagine that bird lands on the rock once every thousand years.’

‘Every thousand years?’

‘Yes.’

‘And then imagine it wipes its beak once on one side, and once on the other side. How long do you think it would take for the whole rock to be worn away?’

Abass jumps up and down between the seats. ‘A very, very long time.’

‘Yes. Not quite infinity but very close to.’

‘Yes,’ agrees Abass. ‘Only the bird would die first.’

Kai and Adrian laugh.

The road takes a series of tight turns down through one small village and then another. Here the houses are tall, wooden with narrow windows and shingled roofs, different from the concrete houses of the city and the clay-brick homes in the villages on the road out to Ileana’s place.

‘The first settlements,’ says Kai. ‘There’s a church, too. It’s worth seeing. But we’ll have to come back another time. We’ve a long drive.’

The road dips down along the valley floor and rises again. Here the macadam has disappeared altogether, giving way to rough laterite and in some places huge moguls round which Kai steers the car, a thirty-year-old yellow Mercedes he calls Old Faithful. A white Land Cruiser races past them, kicking up clouds of red dust, briefly wiping out all visibility. At such a moment Adrian might have halted, but Kai drives on unperturbed. The side of the hill rises steeply on one side of them and falls away equally steeply on the other. Here and there, the smooth scars of landslides. On the far side water pours from high up the hillside on to a slope of sheer, dark rock.

‘Look!’ screams Abass, an inch from Adrian’s ear. ‘Waterfall!’

‘Call that a waterfall?’ says Kai. ‘Wait until you see where we’re going.’

‘How long will it take us to get there?’

‘About three hours.’

‘Three hours!?’ He flings himself back against the seat.

‘Don’t worry. It’s worth it. It’ll get faster once we’re on the main road. Do you want to get some cassava bread and fish at Waterloo?’

‘Yes please.’

A bridge, the width of the car. The railings have fallen away, leaving the sides unguarded. Opposite an oncoming vehicle hovers at the entrance to the bridge, waiting for them to make the crossing. Adrian holds his breath as they do so. They have now skirted the city entirely. It lies to the south of them, between the tail of the car and the Atlantic Ocean. Due north is Guinea, three hundred kilometres as the crow flies. Beyond Guinea – Mali, Mauritania, then sand, the Sahara. They pass a settlement of single-storey houses, open scrub, a scattering of rusted equipment and arrive at the junction for the main road. Here the pace shifts gears suddenly. Vehicles sweep past, swerving, overtaking, sometimes stopping abruptly to allow a passenger to descend or pick up another. Kai is silent, giving his concentration to the road.

Around the bend of the hill the road narrows suddenly, encroached upon by a marketplace. Kai pulls over and lowers the window. ‘Ssssss!’ He raises a hand and clicks his fingers. A woman approaches and lowers a tray from her head. She counts out six fish, golden and blackened, a dozen rounds of flat bread, separates the fish and bread into portions and ladles a deep-red sauce over each. Kai passes a portion to Adrian, to Abass another. Adrian eats with his fingers. The fish is smoky and dry, the cassava bread plain and unsalted – reminding him of unleavened bread. By contrast the sauce is rich, greasy and savoury. Kai starts the car and drives away, eating from his lap with one hand and steering with the other. The sauce stains the tips of Adrian’s fingers saffron.

Up through the hills, trees closing in on either side of the road. The traffic is gone, the road is silent. The landscape flattens out. Rice fields, vegetable plots and tree plantations are gradually replaced by an unvarying wall of elephant grass. There is the occasional broken-down lorry but little else. The interval between settlements widens, children seemingly frozen in a single moment in time watch the passage of the vehicle. Once they pass what looks like a disused quarry. Abass lowers the window and sticks his head out, opens and closes his mouth to make popping sounds and occasionally shouts his name into the wind. Kai presses a cassette into the tape player, the speakers hiss, a drum beat and then another.

Well they tell me of a pie up in the sky
,
Waiting for me when I die
.
But between the day you’re born and when you die
,
They never seem to even hear your cry
.

Abass draws his head back inside the car, stands up between the seats, steadying himself between the headrests, and sings at the top of his voice,
The harder they come
,
the harder they’ll fall, one and all
!

Kai taps the steering wheel. Adrian remembers Kai playing the same tape in the evenings in the apartment during his illness. Another song follows. Abass seems to know the words to each one. Kai leans across and flips open the glove compartment. ‘Choose something.’

Adrian rummages through the space: Biros, latex gloves, matchsticks, cassettes. Next to him Kai takes a corner, swerves suddenly and comes to a halt. Out of the rear window Adrian sees a minibus on its roof in the ditch. A knot of people are gathered in the road. In front of them, a row of cloth-covered shapes.

Kai has the door open. ‘Hold on here a moment.’ He doesn’t pause for an answer but steps out of the car, slamming the door behind him.

‘Wait for me!’ Abass scrabbles at the door handle. ‘I’m coming, too.’ But Kai is already twenty yards away.

‘You know, I think we should wait here,’ says Adrian. ‘Like we were asked to.’

Abass’s head snaps round, he is still tugging at the door. ‘Why?’

‘Well, I think they might need a doctor. They don’t need us, either of us. You stay with me.’

Abass peruses Adrian’s face for a moment, considering his response. Adrian smiles. Abass relaxes and lets go of the door. ‘OK, then,’ he says. Behind the boy’s head Adrian can see Kai pause and squat at each of the covered shapes. There follows a brief conversation with the people by the roadside, Kai walks back to the car and swings himself into his seat, turning down the volume of the music before they drive away.

‘What happened to the
poda poda
? Did it crash?’ asks Abass.

‘Yes,’ says Kai.

‘What happened to the people?’

‘Some of them are dead. The ones who were injured have been taken away. The accident was a little while ago. They’re waiting for someone to collect the bodies.’

‘I want to see the dead people!’ shouts Abass.

‘Well, they didn’t want to see you,’ replies Kai equably.

Abass squirms around on the back seat and stares at the wreck out of the back window as it recedes into the distance. They drive in silence for a while. After a few minutes Kai turns the music up. He has moved on. It is their day out. Abass, too, is soon humming along and pointing out of the window. Adrian tries to erase from his mind the image of the survivors standing waiting, the bulky lozenges beside them, like an orchestra of double-bass players.

A half-hour on Kai turns off the highway on to a dirt road. They traverse a metal bridge high over a slow, wide river and pass through a town. From there they continue east down a long, straight dirt track. Here the landscape is different again, even less cultivated. There are scatterings of black boulders that seem to absorb the sunlight, so starkly black in the dazzling day that Adrian finds it hard to focus upon them. A short series of hills juts out of the flat landscape to cast a shadow over the surrounding earth.

They stop to stretch their legs, the men set off in opposite directions to urinate – Abbas follows Kai. The air is sweet and heavy. Adrian’s clothes and skin are covered in a layer of dust. He shakes his head and dust falls from his cropped hair. The ground at his feet is cracked, and when he relieves his bladder the liquid sends up a small spurt of dust and a white butterfly. From the ice box in the boot Kai fetches cold drinks and the three drink them standing by the car. A man steps out of nowhere and exchanges greetings with Kai. His eyes flick over Adrian with interest, though it is to Kai he addresses his words. From what Adrian can guess, from the nods, the gestures, he is asking where they are going. Kai offers him the empty drink bottle and the man reaches out to accept it gravely. Again and again his eyes slip back towards Adrian. In time he moves on. To where? From where? Adrian cannot imagine. For on either side of them the road reaches out for miles.

It is one o’clock when they turn off the road down a descending and increasingly narrow and uneven track. The track is so overgrown that light is scarce. After ten minutes Kai pulls over and applies the handbrake. ‘We’ll walk from here.’ So they gather their things and set off, Kai in the lead, the cooler from the boot on his shoulder.

‘Have I been here before?’ asks Abass.

‘No, we used to come here before you were born.’

‘How come you never brought me?’

‘It was never possible,’ says Kai, shifting the weight of the cooler, waving off Adrian’s offer of help. ‘There was a lot of fighting around here.’ He turns to Adrian and points somewhere up into the trees ahead of them. ‘There’s a dam up there, a big hydroelectric project.’

‘Are we going to see the dam?’ Abass asks.

‘Not this time.’

Abass runs up behind Kai and butts the small of Kai’s back with his head. Kai catches hold of Abass and swings him around with his free arm. They walk, play-fighting as they go, Abass, head lowered like a small ram. Kai, catching him, swinging him, never breaking his stride.

The call of birds, footsteps on dry leaves, an occasional insect, nothing else. Sweat trickles down Adrian’s back. How hot it is even in the shade! As he walks on Adrian hears a rushing in the air, a white noise. Ahead of them he can see light, muted by the leaves, transforming in the distance into pure, pale, shimmering brilliance. They are by a river. He can see the reflection of the sun upon water. Beneath his feet the way turns to rocks, and he picks his route over and between them. They follow the curve of the river. The noise fills Adrian’s head. Kai turns and calls to him; Adrian can see Kai’s mouth open and close, but hears nothing. He cups his ears. Kai points and Adrian stumbles towards him, his gaze following Kai’s finger.

It is the height of a three-storey building. To Adrian the breadth is as impressive as the depth, for it is some fifty yards wide. Powerful, determined, inexorable, the water is like a great herd of animals, plunging from a cliff of rock into the silent pool.

They picnic on the rocks and then swim. Adrian feels the glow of the cool water enter him. The river is faster moving than it looks and they give in to the current, floating downstream on their backs and ending up in an eddy by the riverbank. They dry off in the sunlight. Adrian’s skin feels clean and smells sweet and faintly brackish. Abass plays with the empty beer bottles in a rock pool, half filling them with water and watching them bob on the surface. Two boys appear with home-made fishing rods and come over to stare at Adrian. After a few minutes Kai tells them to go away. They obey, wordlessly and without apparent resentment, and join Abass at his rock pool. Later, when Adrian goes to relieve himself behind a bush, they will follow him and at his insistence depart, repeating his words between themselves,
Buggeroff, buggeroff
.