The Memory of Love (34 page)

For a few moments she said nothing, but continued to regard me. And when she spoke, she enunciated each word, letting them slide suggestively out of her mouth one by one, poison drops. ‘Elias Cole. Look at your face.’

I refused to let Vanessa’s malicious little call unsettle me; still, it must have done so because later that day I thought I saw Julius. It was a momentary thing. Just a fellow who stepped out of a doorway, something in his profile. He walked on ahead of me and of course it wasn’t Julius at all. I could tell by the walk. And of course, Julius was dead. Still, the shock left me suddenly incapacitated; my knees buckled. It took me some minutes before I could recover and continue on my way.

The day I proposed to Saffia I arrived at the house just as she was dealing with a young hustler who was trying to pretend Julius had owed him money. A lie, of course. Julius had been gone nearly a year, but that didn’t stop people trying. I saw how tired she was beginning to look, how weary of it all. The grant money was just about to come to an end. I made my offer. A practical, rather than a romantic proposal, a compromise between my position and hers. I alluded to Julius. All the time I spoke I was aware of the aunt listening from the recesses of the house. Saffia asked for time to consider my offer. A month later I reiterated and this time Saffia accepted. As I left the house, I saw the aunt on her way back from the mosque. I told her the news, for I wanted to acquire the official seal of approval as soon as possible. The old woman’s face split into an obsequious grin such that I had the impression perhaps she had cared less for Julius than I had imagined.

The Dean, too, offered me his congratulations. He seemed genuinely pleased at the outcome. A few weeks later I was promoted to senior lecturer. And soon after that a house on the campus became available at short notice. The previous occupant had lost his job in the latest round of cuts. It was unfortunate, but these were the facts of life. I kept news of the house from Saffia until I had arranged to have it painted and the roof repaired where the rains had damaged the zinc.

Apropos of all that – Yansaneh, too, was one of the unlucky ones. I went to his leaving party, a sober affair attended by a sprinkling of his colleagues. In his address the Dean thanked Yansaneh for his commitment to the department. Yansaneh rose and said a few words. At one point he seemed overcome by emotion and fell silent, but then regained his voice and thanked several of his colleagues. Only later did it strike me he had made no reference to the Dean, whom convention might have required him to acknowledge. Afterwards people came up and patted him on the shoulder. I shook his hand and offered him my commiserations, but he merely muttered his thanks and kept his eyes fixed on his shoes.

I was sorry for Yansaneh, naturally. But nothing could dent my happiness.

CHAPTER 33

The place name is familiar. This new route to the mental hospital is one Ileana has told Adrian about. It winds up the hill, past the villas of the wealthy, the army barracks and also this familiar name on a hand-painted sign for a hairdressing salon. Because he is in no hurry, Adrian turns the vehicle around the roundabout in the direction the sign points and heads down a track alongside a petrol station, where a number of young men are gathered in the shade of a high wall. They stare through the driver’s window as he passes, sullen and silent. The track narrows, the houses press in upon the street. He is driving slowly now, people make way for him. He pulls over for another car, easing his way around the corner of a building that juts into the road. Waiting for the other car to pass he sees the building is a covered market. Near by a woman sits behind a tray of fish, waving intermittently at the flies in the air. A pair of featherless chickens race in front of the car.

Now the road has opened out. In front of him is a dirt football ground, a tall tree and what looks like a school building on the far side. A game is about to begin, people are gathered in the road that borders the ground. A couple of them wave at him, indicating there’s no way through. One man in a long tunic approaches the vehicle, taps on the glass and points down another road. Adrian takes it without knowing where it leads. He is beginning to regret turning off the main road. At a crossroads at the end of the street the road to the right leads to a church and a dead end. Straight ahead the road appears too narrow for a vehicle to pass. So Adrian turns left, down the hill. The track is badly rutted now, with deep channels on either side. A pair of schoolchildren stand back to let him pass, their heels at the edge of the ditch. Fifty yards on there is another left turn and Adrian takes it, then changes his mind and decides to turn back. There is just enough space to execute a three-point turn, and he does so badly, tyres spinning on the gravel road, clutch whining. As he prepares to set off again, he notices the house. Small by the standards of the villas he passed on the road up the hill, it sits behind an iron gate. There is a doorway reached by a short flight of stairs. The walls are streaked dark green by water and pale by the sun. An overburdened orange tree grows in the front. It is not exactly as he imagined. For one, it sits higher on the land. But still there is enough for him to recognise it, though it is shrouded by trees, has not been painted in many years. This is the pink house.

Adrian climbs down and leaves the vehicle door open behind him. He walks up to the gates and looks through the railings. There is a side gate which looks like it might lead to a garden. It is hard to tell whether the house is occupied or abandoned, such is the state of neglect of so many buildings in the city. The front gate is closed and Adrian stops short of pushing it open. He turns away and climbs back inside the vehicle. At the end of the street he stops for the same pair of schoolchildren, a boy and a younger girl. They do not cross the road, but sidle down the length of the car, eyeing Adrian as they do so. He smiles at them and they do not smile back. He waves and the boy, who might be six, waves too. Adrian watches as they enter through the gate of the pink house.

Mid-afternoon he is doing the rounds with Ileana.

‘How is Mamakay?’

‘She’s well.’

‘I liked her,’ said Ileana.

‘And she liked you.’ Adrian is aware of Ileana’s brown eyes watching him. He does not meet her gaze, but pretends to peruse the notes in his hand.

‘Be careful, won’t you?’

He turns over a leaf, says as casually as he can, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Even he can hear the false note in his own voice.

‘You know very well what I mean, my dear. You’re a psychologist.’

Just then Salia approaches and nothing more is said. Today several patients are ready for discharge, among them Abdulai, the young man whom Adrian brought to the hospital and who in turn first brought Adrian. He is clean now, drug-free for the duration of his stay. Attila has signed his release. Salia has arranged a final consultation between Abdulai and Adrian. Adrian is touched by the thought, for Abdulai has been under Attila’s care. He thanks Salia, who nods formally, before retreating from the ward, his shoes sighing upon the gritty lino floor.

The young man sitting on a chair before Adrian is a different soul to the person Adrian brought to the hospital. He has no memory of that first day when Adrian collected him from the police station and brought him to the hospital.

‘The important thing,’ says Adrian, ‘is how you feel now.’

‘I feel well, Doctor. I feel well in my body.’ He is sitting with his shoulders bent forward, his hands buried between his thighs. His voice contains a slight tremor, a hesitancy, otherwise he appears perfectly normal, if a little nervous.

‘And your head?’

‘Yes, I am well in my head. Except sometimes I feel afraid.’

‘What is it you are afraid of, can you tell me?’

‘Things in my dreams.’ He shakes his head hard.

‘That should improve. Who are you going to? Do you have family?’

Abdulai nods his head. His family were the ones who had delivered him to the police station. As Adrian recalls the police suggested Abdulai had become violent.

‘How will you get home?’

‘Mr Salia has given me money for the
poda poda
.’

‘Your family can’t come and collect you?’

‘My mother has passed on. My father is working.’

At the door Adrian gives Abdulai some of his own money and watches the young man walk to the front gate. He possesses not a single item of luggage, nothing but the clothes on his back. He has spent several weeks in chains, received three meals a day. A few sessions with Attila is all the rehabilitation he’s undergone. Now he is being discharged.

Later, talking to Ileana, watching her perform her tea-making ceremony, Adrian asks, ‘What will happen to him?’

Ileana shrugs and smokes. ‘If he manages to stay off drugs he might be all right.’

‘There’s no follow-up, then?’

‘Even if you could get people to attend, who would run the sessions?’

‘I could.’

‘You’ll be gone in a few months.’ The cigarette in the corner of Ileana’s mouth bobs up and down as she speaks. Adrian watches the length of ash grow, drooping as it increases in length. Just as he is about to push an ashtray towards her, Ileana removes the cigarette and expertly flicks the ash out of the window. ‘Come on. Let’s drink these in the garden.’

Sitting beside him on the bench, Ileana says, ‘There are places he can go. The born-again churches are having a boom time. No surprises there. Same goes for the traditional healers. People believe in them, that’s what is important. Though the traditional healers are really quite interesting. Attila has a lot of respect for them. Some of the antipsychotic drugs we use they were on to hundreds of years ago.’

‘Really? Like what, for example, I mean what drugs?’

‘Reserpine is one I know of.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ says Adrian.

‘No, well,’ says Ileana in a voice that says she is not surprised. ‘We call them witch doctors.’

To Ileana Adrian had made no mention of the fact he was meeting Mamakay later in the day. She is reading now, as she waits for him, her head bent over the open book, an empty bitter-lemon bottle on the table before her, sitting in the clear sunlight at a table with two students. For a moment to Adrian it looks as though she could be anywhere in the world. He slows his pace, to give himself time to look at her. She is unaware of him, lost in the pages of her book. Today she is wearing a fitted print blouse, which exposes her collarbones, and a matching skirt reaching down to her ankles. On her feet a pair of tooled leather sandals. Her hair is tied up high and held back by a scarf. She bites the edge of one thumb, uses the other to follow her progress down the page. She is smiling slightly and he knows, though he cannot see it, that her front teeth overlap very slightly. Her eyebrows are long wings. There is a mole, a concentration of darkness set against dark skin, high on her cheekbone and another below the corner of her mouth. She is not conventionally pretty, the kind of woman Lisa would have called handsome, damning with faint praise a beauty considered to possess too much strength.

Suddenly she snorts, laughs out loud and looks up.

‘Good book?’

She raises the volume to show him the cover.
Three Men in a Boat
, Jerome K. Jerome. About the last thing he was expecting.

‘Have you read it?’ she asks.

‘Not since I was fourteen. Which bit were you reading?’

‘When they stop for lunch at Kempton Park.’

‘And the man tries to move them on?’

‘That’s the part! Harris! He’s something, I tell you.’ She reads a section aloud and begins to laugh all over again.

Adrian watches her, smiles and laughs too.

She slips the volume into her bag. They walk away from the café, past some of the university buildings. Adrian sees painted signs to various faculties, administration buildings, the amphitheatre. When Mamakay mentioned she would be coming to the university today, Adrian had ventured his interest in seeing it. As they walk she offers him a few items of information, points out a building or two. They wind their way uphill, to where the high-rise buildings give way to older two-storey blocks, and finally to an area dominated by trees and lawns and, set amidst them, a scattering of bungalows.

‘This is where the faculty lived. Nice, isn’t it?’

‘It is.’

‘I bet you’re surprised.’

‘Yes,’ he confesses. The grounds are arresting. He isn’t sure now what he was expecting. It wasn’t the university he’d been thinking about all day.

‘Did you study here?’

‘Yes.’

They pass a small stream, the water slipping down a bank of rock and pooling at the roadside. Children are playing in it. They stop to watch Adrian pass by.

‘Here we are,’ Mamakay says.

They have arrived at a curve in the road where the railing has been broken. Adrian looks around, but sees nothing, just the hillside behind them and the trees in front. Mamakay steps through the break in the railing. Adrian follows her along a narrow path. After about twenty yards Mamakay stops. Adrian, concentrating upon his footing, almost bumps into her. He steadies himself, brushing her shoulder; despite her clothing the touch runs through him like a current.

She turns to him and smiles. ‘OK?’

He is standing so close to her. For a moment all he can see are the flecks of brown in her irises, her eyes momentarily in shadow as the wind moves a branch above her. He swallows and nods. He is filled with self-consciousness, aware of his own breathing. She turns away and he follows her gaze to the view through the trees: the city reaching out to the edge of the sea, the red-brown tin roofs of houses, the minarets of the mosques, the steepled roofs and spires of the churches, which dwarf the houses and are in turn dwarfed by the massive white warehouses of the port. The sky is striped with cloud, the horizon is lost in haze. The view of the city is one he has never seen before; he is surprised at the scale of it. Here the sounds of the city are muted. It is cooler, a faint breeze touches him like damp fingers.

His heart is thumping, absurdly, within his chest.

Many hours into the night now. They are in her apartment, they sit with the door open despite the mosquitoes. In this place he can hear the night-time sounds of the city, uninterrupted by the thrum of a generator. From far away, floating upon the dense darkness, comes the sound of late-night prayer. So too does the bass beat of a bar lower down the hill. A blue strobe light marking time. Close at hand the sound of people walking through the narrow street behind the house; voices and steps rebound on the concrete walls. Closer still the sounds of the roosting birds in the dovecote.

‘He dreams,’ says Mamakay of her neighbour, the doves’ owner. ‘And drinks, too.’ She stands up and stretches, her fingertips touch the ceiling, she lets her arms swing back down. She is telling the story of her neighbour. ‘Two days ago he came over, banged on the gate and shouted at me.’

‘Why?’

‘He said I had insulted him. He came around to tell me I was a bad person.’ She laughs.

‘What had you said?’

‘Nothing. He dreamt it all. At first he wouldn’t believe it, but the others told him it was true. They’d been in the dream, too, so he had to believe them.’

‘That must have been quite confusing for him.’

‘Yes. I’m not sure he worked out what was real and what was not. Poor man. Imagine having us hopping in and out of your subconscious.’

‘Does it worry you?’

‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘He was all right before. He will be again. A lot of people here believe in dreams. So do you, don’t you? Psychologists?’

‘Some branches work to interpret them, yes,’ says Adrian. He would not have seen it like that until now, but he cannot say she is wrong. Every day he talks to his patients at the asylum, often asking them about their dreams. What’s the difference, really? She is absolutely right.

The wine bottle is empty, and without wine to refill their glasses, Adrian fears the end of the evening. He tells himself he should leave soon anyway, as he has many times in the last few hours, without ever feeling the slightest desire to do so. Coffee. More wine. The excuses, eked out over the hours of darkness, are running out. The electricity failed early in the evening. The two remaining candles burn low, sending shadows shooting up the walls. He watches now as Mamakay goes to fetch another candle, searching around the apartment.