The Memory of Love (44 page)

Adrian is looking at the piece of paper, half folded, discarded. What is it meant to be? A house? A bird? Where did she learn to do origami? It could only be from Kai. ‘You can’t be sure.’ He is distracted. It’s the wrong thing to say.

Mamakay turns to face him fully. Her voice is harsh. ‘Do you know what it took to survive in a place like this, where everyone was watched all the time, when you never had any idea who your friends were? Waiting to see who would be next.’

Adrian stands up and moves towards her; he wants to take her in his arms. ‘I imagine it took great courage,’ he says.

She moves away, as though his touch would burn her. From the other side of the verandah she looks at him and laughs humourlessly. ‘Oh of course, the new orthodoxy. Everyone’s a victim now. It’s official. But you see, that’s where you’re wrong, Adrian. Courage is not what it took to survive. Quite the opposite! You had to be a coward to survive. To make sure you never raised your head above the parapet, never questioned, never said anything that might get you into trouble.’

‘I see what you’re saying. But still, they could have got the information from somewhere else.’

She turns to look at him, a pitiless look he has never seen before. ‘Everyone talks about they. Them. But who is
they
? Who are
they
? People like Johnson? Paid to do the things they do? Or the people who help them along, who keep their mouths shut and look the other way? My father survived. No, he didn’t just survive, he thrived! And there came a point’ – she takes a deep breath, wraps her arms around herself and half turns away – ‘there came a point I had to ask myself, how could that be?’

With the tips of his fingers Adrian kneads his brow and sighs. This is not what he wanted, to argue. Mamakay continues. ‘Sometimes I think this country is like a garden. Only it is a garden where somebody has pulled out all the flowers and trees and the birds and insects have all left, everything of beauty. Instead the weeds and poisonous plants have taken over.’

Adrian is silent for a moment and so is Mamakay. Then he says tiredly, ‘I’m a psychologist. It’s not my place to make moral judgements. I heal sick minds, or at least I try to. What I don’t do is judge them.’ He intends his words to calm her, to signal a retreat.

‘Who was it who said “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it”?’

‘Churchill,’ says Adrian. ‘Winston Churchill.’

‘He’s using you to write his own version of history, don’t you see? And it’s happening all over the country. People are blotting out what happened, fiddling with the truth, creating their own version of events to fill in the blanks. A version of the truth which puts them in a good light, that wipes out whatever they did or failed to do and makes certain none of them will be blamed. My father has you to help him. You’re just a mirror he can hold up to reflect a version of himself and events. The same lie he’s telling himself and everyone else. And they’re all doing it. Whatever you say, you will go away from here, you will publish your papers and give talks, and every time you do you will make their version of events the more real, until it becomes indelible.’

And in Mamakay’s words Adrian hears the echo of his own thoughts of earlier in the day, only differently stated. The silent lie.

Past midnight Adrian lies with Mamakay in his arms. They have made love not once but twice. He is grateful. Her anger is finally gone. It is too hot to be so close to another human body and yet he will not let go. Only when it becomes unbearable does she finally break free, roll on to her back and say, ‘There is something I need to tell you.’ She never whispers, not even in the dark. ‘I am going to have a child.’

CHAPTER 45

‘Worked for Byron,’ says Seligmann. ‘Nothing women love more than a limp. Brings out their maternal side. What do you say we just fix the one? Leave the other. He’ll thank us. Find a wife faster than he can run.’

With his leave due, Seligmann is uplifted. A whole month at home by the end of which Kai knows he will be bored and fractious as a toddler. Seligmann’s contract with the hospital has just been extended, too. Kai knows the reason why, even though Seligmann still does not.

‘What do you say, Jestina?’ Seligmann wiggles his eyebrows and winks at the new nurse over the top of his mask.

Jestina giggles through her mask and stares at her toes.

‘A club foot, it’s a high road to fame and fortune,’ continues Seligmann. ‘Emperor Claudius, Dudley Moore.’

‘Goebbels,’ says Kai.

Foday lies between them on the operating table, his entire body swaddled in green surgical cloth, his left calf and foot exposed. Seligmann flexes the foot this way and that, gives each toe an experimental pull. He turns around to gaze at the X-rays on the board and then bends down to peer closely at Foday’s foot.

‘This could take a little time. We’ll fix that knee now, as we agreed. And get the big tendon done. That should be straightforward enough. Then go inside the foot and loosen off some of those ligaments. If we need to play around any more we can do that when we begin on the other one. That’s a few months away, at any rate.’ He tickles the underside of Foday’s foot. ‘No giggles? Good. Dreaming of angels. Houston, we have lift-off!’ And he slips his scalpel through Foday’s skin.

Mrs Mara took the news of Kai’s leaving better than Kai dared to imagine. She wished Kai luck with his future career and told him she never expected to hold on to him, only hoped that she would, and finally promised to help in any way she could with his application. It had been that bad.

Her short-term solution was to approach Seligmann and ask him to stay for another six months, in which way she’d averted an immediate staffing disaster. But Seligmann is in his seventies, long retired, working for the love of orthopaedic surgery. He can’t stay on for ever.

Two and a half hours later they have completed work on the knee and the Achilles tendon. The real work would begin in physiotherapy, of which Foday has months ahead of him. Seligmann whistles Elvis’s ‘Love Me Tender’ as he leans forward and inspects the inside of Foday’s foot. ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘What do you say we try switching these two tendons around?’

Kai nods. The day is coming soon when he will have to tell Seligmann that he plans to leave. Seligmann, who loves his work here almost as much as he loves his own wife.

Late in the afternoon Kai climbs the hill in the garden of the old house. He needs to call his parents, see what they want to do, whether rent it out or board it up. So far there have been no thieves, not counting the looters during the first invasion when his parents still lived there. This time he notices a broken window at the back of the house. And it looks like people have been climbing the wall of the garden – to collect firewood and fruit from the trees, very likely. The garden is overrun. The grass has grown so high as to obscure the fact of the terraces. It reaches halfway up the trunks of the candelabra trees. Kai pushes his way towards the verandah, swings himself up and over the low railings. Coming straight from the hospital he has no key. He wanders around the side of the house. At the corner he stops. There are scorch marks on the marble floor. An empty Peak Milk tin rolls in and out of a corner. The big metal kitchen door stands ajar. Silently he moves forward and enters the kitchen. There is the cooker. The fridge is gone. Old newspapers and plastic bags fill the sink. Kai tries a tap, nothing. Idly he tries a light switch, and is amazed when the bulb flickers on.

The house smells of mildew and dust. The door of the master bedroom is missing. Inside the bedroom a mattress lies on the floor, a great scorch mark like a black petalled flower at its centre. Kai tries the drawers of the dresser. For the most part they are empty; inside one he finds an old prescription and in another a single gold earring in the shape of a swallow. He recognises it as belonging to his mother and puts it in his pocket. He checks the bathroom and then the other rooms one by one.

For several months after his parents’ departure Kai had stayed on in the empty house, alone with a three-piece suite and a television, the only items of furniture he hadn’t given away. He passes the room where his sister used to sleep. The room at the end of the corridor is where he spent most of his growing years. He’d left behind a full set of
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, purchased by his father by mail order and appropriated by Kai, moved from the family room into his bedroom. What innocence, he thinks, in the idea that the sum of human knowledge could be held in twenty bound volumes.

When Kai had spoken to his sister by telephone, they’d agreed to keep the news of his leaving from their parents until it was confirmed. She’d sounded serious rather than elated, had asked him if he was sure. Yes, Kai had said. Yes, he was sure. Almost telepathically she’d asked him whether he had news of Nenebah. No, Kai lied.

Nenebah. She’d looked just the same, and for a moment – the moment before she saw him – it seemed to him she looked happy. Then she had turned towards where he stood in the middle of the quadrangle, exposed, body and soul. He watched her smile vanish. They’d greeted each other with the formality of lovers whose wound is not yet healed. So unlike Nenebah, the careful solicitous voice, asking after his mother, his father and even his sister with whom she had rarely seen eye to eye.

For so long he had done everything in his power to avoid thinking about her. Gradually, without realising it, he’d let her slip back into his thoughts.

There was Adrian, standing behind her, a hand on her shoulder, looking from Kai to Nenebah and back again, the smile slowly setting on his face. What would have happened, Kai wonders, if Adrian had not been there, if they’d been alone?

He pushes at the door to the room. The first thing he notices is the smell, of sweat and stale cigarette smoke. The windows are closed, upon the bed is a nest of sheets and in the corner of the room a pair of shoes, old-fashioned men’s lace-ups that once belonged to his father, cracked and polished, stuffed with newspaper. Books have been removed from the shelves and stacked upon the floor. An empty can serves as an ashtray. From a piece of wire strung from a window bar to a nail on the wall, a pair of trousers hangs. The mystery of the missing fridge is solved. Kai crosses the room and pulls hard at the door. The suction yields suddenly and audibly. The fridge is empty, the stench from inside appalling. He follows the lead to the plug lying on the floor. Then he crosses to a window and pushes it open. A sound makes him turn quickly. The bathroom door is open, where before it was closed. Somebody is watching him from the darkness.

‘Who’s that?’ says Kai. ‘Hey, you.’

He moves towards the bathroom. The face disappears. Kai reaches out for the door, but before his hand touches it a person dashes past him, knocking his arm aside. A boy. Kai snatches at his shirt, but the boy wrenches himself free and races for the door. Kai goes after him and grabs his arm.

‘Hey,’ he says, softly this time. ‘Stop.’

For a moment the boy looks him full in the face and Kai sees something familiar in him. He relaxes his grip. The boy is motionless, his eyes never leave Kai’s face. Suddenly he pulls away and makes for the door. This time Kai abandons the effort of following. He notices the boy’s fingernails, his hand upon the door – fingernails painted pink. And then he is gone. Kai stands still and exhales. Now he’s forgotten what he’d been doing here in the first place. Yes. He thought he might take the encyclopaedias home for Abass. But there is nothing here for Abass, or for him. As he leaves he closes the door behind him, makes his way through the house, leaving the doors open as he found them, and descends the hill to where he parked Old Faithful in the shade of an avocado tree.

On the drive back down the hill towards home Kai places the boy. The son of one of their old cooks. Kai’s parents had paid his school fees for a few years, until Kai’s mother sacked the father for pilfering. He stops the car and sits for several seconds with his hands on the steering wheel, then reverses up the hill. He walks into the house, to his old bedroom, plugs the fridge into the socket and switches it on. And this time when he leaves, he doesn’t look back.

Kai enters his cousin’s house to find himself surrounded by noise. In the middle of the room two of his aunts appear to be pleading or possibly remonstrating with his cousin. His cousin meanwhile is shaking her head, holds her hands up in front of her as though fending them off. Everybody is talking at once. Of Abass there is no sign. It takes Kai ten minutes to discover what has happened.

Abass had sworn at his mother. Now he has locked himself in his bedroom.

The word, the exact word he’d used, was sufficiently bad for his mother to propose a beating. The aunts were begging for mercy on Abass’s behalf. Neither spoke English and so could have no idea of the meaning of the word, for otherwise they would most certainly have joined in the call for a beating. As it is, neither Kai nor his cousin is inclined to be the one to explain to them, and so a compromise is reached.

Kai knocks on the bedroom door and softly calls Abass’s name. No answer. Kai turns the handle but the door doesn’t yield. Abass has drawn the bolt on the other side.

‘Abass,’ he calls. ‘Come and open the door.’

Silence.

‘Will you let me in? Your mother wants me to talk to you.’

The sound of footsteps. Abass opens the door. He looks small and serious, worried but with an overtone of defiance. Kai slips inside the room and Abass closes the door after him and slides the bolt. They sit side by side on the bed.

‘That was bad, what you called your mother.’

Abass shrugs.

‘Well, wasn’t it?’

Abass doesn’t reply and Kai senses he has no idea of the meaning of the word for which he is now in so much trouble.

‘At least you must know why you did it. Your mother asked you to help her with the church chairs and you disappeared instead. That’s not good either, is it?’

Abass shrugs again. Kai exhales lightly with frustration. ‘What’s up, my friend?’

‘All she does is go to church.’

‘Who, your mother? Your mother is a Christian: that’s a good thing, isn’t it?’

Abass shrugs again.

Kai says, ‘You don’t want her to go to church?’

‘I don’t like them coming here. All they do is pray and pray and then take all our money. They used to come once a week. Now they come nearly every day. And I don’t like them.’

Kai couldn’t agree more, but it would not do to say so. Instead he asks, ‘What would you like to happen instead?’

Abass shakes his head and shoves his hands between his knees.

‘Well?’

The boy mumbles something, so low Kai hardly hears it. ‘I want her to play with me.’

‘I see.’ He puts an arm around Abass. ‘Well, you’re getting a bit old to play, aren’t you?’

‘I mean stay with me …’ He tails off.

‘You want to spend more time with your mother, is that it?’

Abass nods.

‘I see.’ Kai looks across the top of the boy’s head, across the room. There on the windowsill, the row of origami animals he has made for Abass over the years, faintly red with dust. He says, ‘I think it gives your mum comfort to pray. And I think that’s something we should respect, whatever we think ourselves. We must just be patient and polite, even to the preacher.’ He nudges Abass lightly and the boy giggles and then grows serious.

‘What does she need comfort for?’

There it is again. Soon there will be no avoiding it. Abass believes his father died a natural death and a peaceful one, which is as much as he has been told. Kai needs to talk to his cousin, to make her listen. For now he says, ‘We’ll talk about that another time. Meanwhile you apologise to your mother and then you and I can do something.’

Abass turns, looks at him and says, ‘But you’re going away, too. You’re going to live in America.’

‘Well, I’m not going any time soon,’ replies Kai. Until now he hadn’t realised quite how much Abass has been quietly working out for himself.

And only several hours later, by which time the church congregation had departed and Abass was fast asleep, does Kai realise exactly what Abass had said.

‘Going away, too’, without even knowing it. Abass had said ‘going away,
too
’.