The Memory of Love (4 page)

The canteen is still empty, save for two men in porter’s uniforms hunched over scattered Lotto tickets and a newspaper. The woman behind the counter heaps rice upon his plate and then, turning to the two tureens behind her, lifts the lid of the nearest and spoons chicken and sauce on top of the rice. A fortnight or so before Adrian had noticed how the woman served the local staff in the queue from the other tureen. He had asked the woman behind the counter what was inside the other pot.

‘Chicken.’

Her unhelpfulness had provoked his insistence.

‘I’ll have some of that, please.’ The woman had duly served him with what appeared to be identical chicken stew. At the table Adrian ate a spoonful. The food was fiery with pepper. Glad to be alone, he’d reached for a glass of water and another, returned to his office without finishing his meal, his mouth and lips still smarting.

Since then the woman behind the counter nods at him, and sometimes smiles. She appears to gain no particular satisfaction from what occurred, rather it seems to give their daily encounters a modest intimacy. Adrian remembers that day for the chicken stew and also because it was the day the new patient sent for him.

That the new patient was a man of some standing was evidenced by the fact he had a private room. Adrian passed the room every day on his way to his office. Never had he seen any visitors, save a retainer carrying sometimes a cloth-covered basket, sometimes a knotted sheet of soiled bedlinen, sometimes a pile of laundered clothes. Another time Adrian had glimpsed, through the slit of the partially opened door, the retainer sitting on the bed, fanning the torpid air with a raffia fan, chasing flies and adjusting the bed sheets with a twitch of the fingers, just like the mothers on the children’s ward.

The day Adrian returned to his office, his lips smarting, he had found the retainer squatting on his haunches outside his office door.

‘Can I help you?’ Adrian unlocked the heavy door and the man rose and followed him into the room. Once inside he handed Adrian a folded slip of paper. Adrian opened the paper. It contained no more than a few lines, faint pencil strokes that meandered slowly across the page and spoke of an elderly hand.

Dear Sir
,

I wish to request some time alone with you. I would be grateful if you gave Babagaleh, the bearer of this note, a date and hour convenient to yourself. I have no particular restriction on my own time, though it is, by nature of my condition, somewhat limited
.

Yours faithfully
,

Elias Cole Esq
.

*

Out of the night, a scream. Adrian wakes, sweating and disorientated. The fan is still, the air in the room is hot. He lies and listens. The whirr of crickets, a truck somewhere in the distance, the call of a night bird. The window above his bed is open and the air carries the scent of woodsmoke, fragrant, like burning cedar. Adrian wonders if perhaps the scream belonged in his sleep, but then hears it again, plainly. A woman’s cry.

He reaches under the mosquito net and switches on the lamp at his bedside, lets his eyes adjust to the light, from the chair takes a T-shirt, slips it over his head and opens the door on to the courtyard his bungalow apartment faces. A commotion is unfolding by the hospital gates. Out of the darkness a gurney pushed by two orderlies bearing a great, bulbous shape appears beneath the greenish glow of the security lights. A nurse holds up a drip. The trolley hurtles in the direction of the operating theatre. Adrian moves forward a few paces, peering through the dim light. As the group move closer he sees the form on top of the trolley is, in fact, two people: a man crouching astride an inert form. The man is pushing down with the heels of his hands, using his entire weight – or so it seems – to press down upon the patient’s abdomen. The patient is a woman, hugely pregnant.

Someone shouts an order to stop. As Adrian watches the doctor continues to bear down upon the woman, at the same time exhorting her to push. It seems unthinkable to Adrian that a woman in her condition could possibly tolerate such treatment. His eyes are drawn to the child’s head just visible, half in, half out of this world.

The one birth Adrian witnessed took place inside a room overlooking the Thames and the Houses of Parliament. Nothing prepared him for the terror – which he tried vainly to conceal. He sensed, or thought he sensed, his wife’s forgiveness reach him from inside her cavern of pain. Later a retrospective guilt grew inside him, like the guilt of a soldier caught running away from enemy fire. Nevertheless, with or without his courage, it had happened. One moment the two of them were on one side of something huge. The next, tumbling down the other side. His daughter was born.

In the half-lit corridor, on a narrow trolley and in the dead of night, another child is being born before Adrian’s eyes. The doctor on top of the woman gives a final, mighty push. At the same time the woman utters a long, low groan. A gush of liquid, the child slips out. Adrian watches, waits for someone to step forward and pick the infant up, slap his bottom, or blow into his airways. There is a terrible stillness about the child, lying there between his mother’s legs. Adrian, who knows so little of such matters, knows this much. The life being saved belongs to the woman.

Inside the apartment he leans against the door frame and lets the breath out of his body, listens to the sound of the trolley, slower now, fade away. He pulls off his T-shirt and crawls back underneath the mosquito net. For a while he lies on his back, eyes closed. Behind his lids he sees the scene, the baby’s head, the eyes: closed and peaceful, as though he had taken a look at the world he was about to enter and changed his mind.

Sleepless now, he turns on the light for a second time and climbs out of bed. In the kitchen he pours himself a glass of water from the bottle in the fridge. Tiny red ants mass around a half-biscuit on a plate, the edges of a patch of spilled guava juice, like beasts around a vanishing water hole. He picks up the plate; the ants swarm over his fingers delivering fiery bites. He swings around, drops the plate into the sink and holds his hand under the tap, watches the flailing ants sucked into the vortex.

In the sitting room he sits upon the crumbling foam cushions of the couch and picks up a book from the shelf beneath the coffee table. It is an English novel, of the kind taught in schools and left by the previous occupant. Adrian opens it randomly and begins to read, has difficulty concentrating, becomes entangled by words and their meaning. Then, before he can reach the end of the paragraph, the lights fail. For a moment he sits, insufficiently bothered to move, lets himself give in to the inertia and finds it comforting. A minute passes, then another. The thought occurs to him to sleep on the settee, when a series of rapid knocks on the door jerks him into alertness.

The man on the doorstep is dressed in green hospital scrubs, a T-shirt pulled over the top, on his feet a pair of rubber flip-flops. His face is lost in the darkness.

‘Hey,’ he says.

‘Hello.’

‘Sorry to bother you. Thought I might crash here a few hours, hope you don’t mind.’ A pause. The man points beyond Adrian’s head, to the interior of the room. ‘The light was on.’

Adrian blinks and, not knowing what else to do, moves aside.

‘Thanks,’ says the man, as he steps over the threshold into the apartment. His movements are exact, assured, unlike Adrian, who fumbles to find a candle and matches, light the candle’s wick and set it on the table. In the trembling yellow light he sees something familiar in the man’s profile.

‘You were attending the woman just now?’

The visitor nods.

‘What happened?’

‘What happened?’ The man looks up at Adrian. ‘The baby was stuck. The woman was in labour for two days.’

‘And now?’

He shrugs. ‘Well, now it’s out.’

Adrian is silent at that.

The man scratches his ear, but ventures nothing further. Then, ‘So you live here?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Yeah, I think I heard that. We used to use this place, you know. In-between times, after a late call. Mind if I crash?’

‘I’ll fetch some linen.’

‘Don’t trouble yourself.’

Adrian goes into the bedroom anyhow, where he locates a pair of sheets and takes a pillow from his own bed. When he returns the man is sitting, barefoot now, thumbing through the volume Adrian has left open on the table, squinting at the print in the inconstant light and pinching the place between his eyebrows. At the sound of Adrian’s tread, he replaces the book carefully, face down as he had found it. For some reason Adrian wants to tell him it doesn’t matter, the book doesn’t belong to him, but he says nothing. As he bends to put the sheets and pillow down, the man looks up and extends his hand.

‘Kai Mansaray,’ in an exhausted voice.

‘Adrian Lockheart.’

‘Pleased to meet you.’ He places the pillow against the wooden arm of the settee, punches a hole in it to create a hollow and lies down.

With no more apparently forthcoming, Adrian carries the candle through to his bedroom, the shadows rearing up and shrinking back around him, and climbs into bed.

In this country there is no dawn. No spring or autumn. Nature is an abrupt timekeeper. About daybreak there is nothing in the least ambiguous, it is dark or it is light, with barely a sliver in between. Adrian wakes to the light. The air is heavy and carries the faint odour of mould, like a cricket pavilion entered for the first time in the season. It is always there, stronger in the morning and on some days more than others. It pervades everything, the bed sheets, towels, his clothes. Dust and mould.

Outside his window somebody is talking in a loud voice. He has no idea what they are saying. For a moment his mind drifts with the thought. To be surrounded by languages you don’t understand. Of how it must, in some ways, be like being deaf. The deaf children he knew, whose parents sometimes came to see him, became remote, cut off, even inside their own families. Silent islands. By the time they were diagnosed the damage to the relationship with their parents and siblings was already done. No wonder, he thinks, that the deaf create their own communities. Deliberately turning their backs on the hearing world.

In the kitchen Kai Mansaray, barefoot but dressed in the clothes of the night before, is opening and closing cupboard doors. He doesn’t turn when Adrian greets him.

‘Hey, man. Not much here. Tell me you have coffee!’

Adrian opens a cupboard on the opposite wall and finds the tin of instant coffee. He fills the kettle with water from the plastic bottle and lights the gas ring.

Kai Mansaray watches him.

‘Boiling sterilises it.’

‘Yes, I know,’ says Adrian, feeling the other’s gaze. He fetches down the only two mugs he possesses and prises the lid of the coffee tin open with the end of a teaspoon. ‘How did you find the couch? I hope it was all right.’

‘Yeah, fine, fine. Me and your couch go back a long time. I’m not a big sleeper anyhow. I had to check on my patient.’

‘How is she doing?’ When there is no reply, Adrian glances up. Kai Mansaray is studying the label on the coffee tin. Adrian can’t be sure whether he has heard the question or not. Suddenly the other man looks up at him.

‘I could eat,’ he announces. ‘I’ll make us breakfast.’

‘There’s nothing much here.’

‘You don’t say.’ For the first time since they met, Kai Mansaray smiles. ‘You relax.’ He steps around Adrian, so nimbly Adrian doesn’t have time to move out of the way, opens the door of the apartment. ‘Sssss! I say! Come!’ he beckons. A hospital porter hurries over. Kai hands him a few coins and a short time later the porter reappears carrying a plastic bag and two freshly baked loaves of bread wrapped in newspaper. Kai passes him a coin in return and the porter nods gratefully and retreats. On the kitchen counter Kai lays down the loaves of bread and unpacks the bag: a tin of powdered milk, another of Kraft cheese, onions, a dozen eggs, a fruit: large, oval and green with a ridged skin, a single lime.

Adrian dresses to the sounds of his visitor preparing breakfast in the kitchen. Efficient sounds, that relay a deftness of hand, a certainty of procedure. Still he dresses quickly. By the time Adrian reappears the apartment has been overtaken by the smell of frying onions. In the kitchen Kai Mansaray breaks eggs with one hand into a soup bowl, and whisks them into a froth. He has made coffee in the teapot and replaced the broken lid with a saucer. Adrian pours two cups, and sets one where the visitor can reach it, then leans back on the counter. In the silence a prickle of self-consciousness touches him. He shifts from one foot to the other. Watching the newcomer move around the kitchen, his kitchen, as though he were a man entirely alone in his own space, it is Adrian who feels like the intruder.

He has yet to become used to it, the silences between people. In Britain people came, or were sent, to see him. He learned to examine their silence, to see if it was tinted with shame, or pain, or guilt, coloured with reluctance or tainted with anger. He himself used silence as a lure, pitting his own silence against theirs, until they were compelled to fill the void. Here those tricks have no place, even with those whom he calls his patients. If Adrian falls silent, so too do they, waiting patiently and without embarrassment. Here the silences have a different quality, are entirely devoid of expectation. And so he watches Kai Mansaray shaving curls of cheese with a knife blade. Swift, deft movements. Next Kai spoons two teaspoons of powdered milk into a tea cup, dribbles a little water from the tap into it and mixes the powder and water into a paste. This he adds to the eggs along with the cheese, relights the gas ring beneath the frying pan and pours the mixture into it. While the eggs cook he divides the fruit, scooping out shiny grey-black seeds, cuts a lime in half and squeezes the juice over the orange flesh. They sit down at the table to eat.